Take Heart Mama Nigeria Poem by Michael Eziudo

You're growing old
Vast in experience and knowledge more than I'm told
More than I see
Your beauty is beyond the reflection of the marriage between the setting sun and the sea
Your skin glows like that of the African princess smoothened with cucumber and honey
Your face is quite oval with big suckling lips, and pointed lashes.
When you smile to any
They hold their breaths at the sight of your dimples and gaps in between your front teeth
All that make your smile infectious
Your breasts? Oh, two attractive beauties that house all the resources needed to feed all your children and more

But what do I see of you now?
Mama, you're abused
Abused by these sheer rapists that have no compassion no love for you
They come with sugarcoated acids in their mouths
And spill them on your face
And when you're helplessly down in agony and tears
They begin their operations
Not even condom is in the list of their tools of brutal operations
To avoid injection of deadly semen so that the ovules and the embryos, your future generations, are not corrupted
Or that they don't infect you with life threatening tuberculosis that breeds kwashiorkor

They squeeze out the breast milk from your breasts and store in their banks abroad
And claiming that they're making you up they use their makeup tools to drain every liquid off your robust flesh and siphon all your body contents

And your kids? Oh, mama of many children!
Your children have scattered themselves here and there and have forgotten if there's ever anything like unity in diversity
Aboki says it's his birthright to be the head
Nyamiri just rigmaroles and looks and waiting for time ahead
Omi Obe swims in loss of identity and sadness he brought himself as a result of his role as a betrayer
And then even your kids in them three suffer from malnutrition and confusion
They cry
Who will our saviour be
Yet, it looks like their future is written on a sky of cold stone

And I see for tomorrow
A time of let it go or bloodshed
When these children will hold the bull by the horn
When rigging will be faced with bullets and machetes
Blows and beatings and not time consuming court sessions
It will rather then be division or unity in diversity
Because steps taking by those concerned have nipped the cancerous pangs in the buds
So I see a beautiful dewy harmattan dawn after these mournful heartbreaking nights

Mama, paramedics will be here with drugs to ease your pains and heal the wounds
And they will come along with surgeons
To smoothen the patches

Mama, at this age, you are still young
It may not be alright now but years to come it will
After all, your role-models are two hundred years older than you
You read what they too went through when they were at your age
But in your case, things will get better sooner than usual
I know so
Take heart mama.