Waitng For Emancipation Poem by Tony Adah

Shrapnel just fall
Scatter all over the streets
The townspeople stampede their way
Not knowing to run to
The next moment not a sure moment
Citizens are rebranded and grouped
Into a primary school ground, without buildings
Where pupils squat under mango and nim trees
And now they're absent
Because of the bombs.

The citizens bombs have
Driven from the town, frail and hungry
Stomachs sticking to the spine,
The children whose ribs could be counted
Take up a new name in shiny acronyms
Here the caregivers feet fat
And the refugees thin and weak.

I began to search my dictionary
To look up IDPs
What I see
A description of huddled citizens
In their own land
Crystallized into an aid letter
To the Red Cross Society through
Our slug and dead post office.

As I await a helping hand
I discovered I too have not eaten
Looking at the faces of hunger
I see hunger itself
And I, a limb of it
Hearing the sound of uncurbed bombs
My entrails melt and shake with water.

Now I remember my dictionary
And I too have become an internally displaced person
Waiting for emancipation.