Colonial Consortium

I begin with the coal tossed out of the window.

Then a new emergence, oil dragged into limelight. 

You see, just like London, your homes will transform 

they said, at the extraction of this shapeless gold.

In Congo, same narrative, where rubber 

was taken with replacement for mutilation 

& then carbonatites, alkaline & cobalt 

& the country & its people hollowed into wreck—

This history of this destruction is clear as fog, 

because the men of the people sat in the creation 

of the fog alongside the men in Caucasian skin.

With heavy thuds, the ground rumbled in Ogoni

as men in hard hat helmet & a dirty boiler suit

drilled into the ground for oil— killing the sensation 

of the land, like the sensation of a body's movement.

It is 1993 & placards stay in hands high 

in the tension—save Ogoni Environment, it says,

the man withholding the placard, you could imagine 

his eyes wet with blood 

in the dawn of Saro-Wiwa’s killing, two years later.

& the little boys & young men holding up green leafs with

screams dotted with the readiness for rebellion—

Assassins Go Home, another placard reads. 

These men, what did they become

in the flaring fire, its burning of homes & dreams.

Torture wrapped into silver, this oil &

the country tied in the Dutch disease by the military men—

We lost our abilities for green & chose the soot.

Cocoa & Palm oil & Palm Kernels & groundnut 

driven into uselessness. How to name a hopeless country:

call it the name of the country I’m from.  

This land is lost for the next 1000 years. 

Nothing is going to grow here, the politician said. Ogoni land—

destitute, sullied into everything a land should not embody. 

Like death & its scorched wasteland filled with grieving songs

of mother & men & disease.

We want a land without pipeline in its veins—

Ken & MOSOP & the constant cries.

Times’s thug of the year 1995 to be will come knocking 

with a rope hanging in his hands.