Oil dirt

The rippling sea lies vast,
soiled by the dirt
from the bellies of the long ships at the terminal.
Mt. Tuma stirs the bed of a bad memory,
better forgotten because too bitter to be true.
Because too bitter to the memory.

The Oil sells for $150 a barrel.
But not a cent to soothe a peasant’s empty stomach.
The peasant man sings a song in his nightmares,
Each night the other dead peasants haunted him.
As they toiled in the mines
of their cold solitary tombs.
Groping in the dark of their unmarked graves.
Toiling in their hell to build us a nation.

And those uprooted and torn apart,
by the gods and dogs of war, and their angry guns,
in the swampy creeks of the Niger Delta,
the tides wash their blood ashore with the setting suns.
Killing the fishes in the poor fisherman’s net.

Oh, not again he cries, beating the ground.
Oh, not again, not again he wailed.
Wringing his heart to shreds in his callous hands.
The tides wash the oil dirt to the shores.
Killing the peasant man’s periwinkle