SILENT SENTINEL AT THE VILLAGE GATE
ilent sentinel, are you not meant
To stop war mongers and invaders
From entering the village?
Are you not meant to fight terrorism
And prevent wars in our village
And ensure peace, harmony and peaceful co-existence
And universal altruism in our world?
Silent one, where were you
When blood-thirsty monsters
Killed over four million Congolese?
Where were you when ethnic warlords
Overran Rwanda and terminated
Over five-hundred thousand lives?
Castrated he-goat, merely bleating
About the town hall, where were you
When Liberia burnt in its needless conflagration
Which killed two thousand five hundred people
And conscripted underaged children to fight the war of blame?
Eunuch atop a virtuous woman,
Where were you when the House of Sierra Leone
Burnt intractably and consumed three thousand of its citizens
Rendering millions homeless and turning them into
Street nuisances across the globe?
Where were you good-for-nothing firewood
When Ethiopia and Eritrea fought one another
And sent seventy thousand souls to their untimely graves?
Where were you when the Janjaweed killed four hundred thousand Dafurians?
Where were you when thunder struck in Uganda, Chechnya, East Timor,
And the Serbs and Albanians butchered and killed one another?
Blind bat, where were you when tigers, leopards
Bears, pythons and Alsatian bulldogs forced
Their way to the village to maim, kill,
Destroy and devour innocent souls?
So why should the world continue to keep
This money-guzzling assembly which is not better than
The League of Nations, but has looked the other way
Whilst the Middle East remains perpetually convulsive?
A barren fig tree is good only for the fire,
And a toothless bulldog is good for nothing,
But to be tied and burnt at the stake
Is it not useless wasting precious resources
On a barren land that cannot yield fruits?
If the silent sentinel can play second fiddle to the
The “Great Satan”, why keep him
To guard the village gate?
- JOHN ODEY ADUMA
British Chevening Scholar.
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