Portrait of My Father Spilling War Stories

The bullet that will house itself within you
rests in a soldier’s rifle. You do not know it yet.
A pregnant gun will give you the pleasure
of holding its baby. He does not know it yet either.
That he wears your end around him like a necklace.
The news says there were Igbo men who couldn’t reach
the train in Borno. The zephyr betrayed their legs
the way their strong accents betrayed their truths.
What halcyon memory comes to a man in genuflection,
asked to mutter prayers in languages his tongue
will falter in? The solstice happens in front
of a compound gate. A lullaby plays the citizens
to sleep. A father, lay face-down in quietude,
mouth covered by gossamer. A mother, naked,
deep cuts trailing her breasts to her thighs
like roadlanes. The goats, with quieted bleats
in their stomachs, make loud cries with their eyes.
Is total silence the price for a protest?
There is a russet train moving back to Enugu.
Some women hold onto the railings like lifelines.
Men sit on the floor with their broken masculinity.
There is only enough space for air to ruffle its way
through. This is what it means to be Igbo in ways
you would never be Nigerian. At Port Harcourt,
families jot things to pick before the siege
loots them. A mother writes her list:
              1. My life from the mouth of death.
              2. My clothes, & my prayer beads, & my child.
              When the war comes, she picks everything
              but her life.