Rafah by Oyin Oludipe

South Gaza

Flaw

Of pinwheel tails, of rent spires

Where ogres flash a sky-lane for

Earths to cast broken hairs

Deathless

On her limbless leap, thawed

At firestorm. Lumps. Monster liege

In morbid walls of botanist skin . . .

A world’s lone trophy at dusk?

This dusk

Her lips were split with missile rubs,

An anthem’s bait upon her thirst, yet

The pulsing skull of her would

Pardon?

Trailing a journalist’s morose report from that region, the bombardments at various parts of Gaza have only recalled to centre stage the sheer human gluttony for senility; the senile repetitions of violence in the place of reconciling ties, plain war crimes in the place of advancing ideology.

The recurrence sullies, as in the headlong dive of entire humanity into indignity. It is so because when a people – sentient beings as they are – are severed from the self-worth an immediate environment is supposed to proffer, that same denial also permeates to the very wider global human society it is intimately linked with. Albeit variant in outlook and motive, that Palestinian grief is, in no way, dissimilar to the spate of extremism we have whelming this country Nigeria on the precipice.

Somewhere in Rafah, after more than twenty four hours of Isreali aerial attacks, at an average of five an hour, the city’s morgues have had to place the bodies of the dead in cold storage constructed for fruits and vegetables. Because cemeteries and funeral processions are also being assuaged, people are afraid to bury their dead.

Photo Credit: I24News.