To My Silent Reader

There you are,
Lifting my hopes with the sound of your footsteps,
Of course I am glad,
Where would I be without your visits
A preacher without a pew
A speaker without an audience
A soliloquy.

But pray,
Why never a word?
Not a sound.
No sign of what did or did not please you?
Is it shyness?
Then let’s burn it
Is it slyness?
Then let’s stop it,
Let our meetings be give and take
So your words
Would birth fresh founts of prose
Or poetry
Satire or commentary.

Pray my visiting stranger,
Speak to me.

Numbers

234 taken,
Swept off their beds to a den of demons

91 slain,
Felled as they studied to be better Nigerians,

50 bombed,
As they made their daily bread,

Thousands displaced, scared, hurt, wounded, broken,

Known by numbers
Not by name,
Not by their particular pain.

A scattering of dots on a statistician’s page,

No one listens,
No one fights their cause.

Yet the papers announce the numbers,
The dozens,
The thousands and
The scores,

Weeping like pus from our festering national sore.