Image by wdkunze from Pixabay
Our Last Supper Dinner tonight is the last tuber of yam in our barn – for five siblings; again, my mother is not going to eat, because for her, food means sleeping hungry for her children. Yesterday, she returned looking exhausted after standing under the heartless Ifite sun for Covid-19 palliative; “the government said they have not received order to share the foodstuffs,” she said. There are many families like ours Whose ends rarely ‘meat’. Even our childhood dreams have been eaten by hunger, and we are survived by a reflex assurance of “It is well,” and “E go better”. “When?” I ask.
No matter how we save in okochi,
udu mmiri is always a rainy day. Last night, the Reporter reported that, “…climate change is the reason for poor harvest….” What about the legislative weather under which everyone I know has become a fraction of their body mass index? There’s a spot in the roof which knows my face from constant staring – reminiscing the story of the Israelites in the desert // although there’s enough milk in his breast, our Moses hoards our palliative – the difference is manna and manner. I come from Zarephat Where everyone is a widow, Because we live on miracles. Like this line, every meal is our Last Supper. …
Okochi is an Igbo word for Dry season.
Udu mmiri is an Igbo word for Rainy season. “E go better” (Nigerian pidgin)
Godstime Nwaeze is a poet and an essayist. His works have been published or are forthcoming from The Kalahari Review, Parousia Magazine, The Braided Way, International Human Rights Art Festival Publishes, World on the Brink (a Covid-19 anthology), Micah (an anthology of top 100 poems of the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize, 2019), Social Science Research Network, among others. He won the EndSARS National Poetry Competition by International Human Rights Art Festival and the Society of Young Nigerian Writers, 2020. He was also shortlisted for the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize, 2019, and Wole Soyinka International Cultural Exchange essay writing competition, 2020. Godstime is presently an undergraduate of Law at Nnamdi Azikiwe University. He hails from Izzi in Ebonyi State, Nigeria. For him, writing is a close friend with whom he navigates the world.