Legend of My Mother
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It was under a half sleeping sky, 2005, I retired from the open yard of my hometown to the outskirts where our house stands. On alighting from a motor-cycle, I saw lights like eyes of cats piercing rays at me. First I thought they were police men or civil defense men so fear could not grip my heart. These four men walked towards me arrogantly and my eyes fell on the AK-47 guns that clinched to them like a woman would lay her hand on her lover's shoulder.
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Two of them gripped me like a criminal and one said to the Okada (motor-cycle) rider that he should disappear, and indeed he did disappear even with my money. Then to me I heard from one of them, " Your father has been showing himself too much in this community, and since you are his eldest son, today we shall kill you to ring a warning into his ears". My father is a good person, he loves peace, hates oppression, and he hates criminals. He was into politics but jilted it because he understand that it is a dirty game that only the corrupt politicians win. After he won his first election, he refused to continue the political career.
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On that fateful night, before I arrived home, someone has passed informations to my dad about the presence of some bad boys in the neighbourhood. My dad took a gun and went thru bush towards the direction were they were seen at first. Unknowingly to him, they have come to his house while he is out there looking for them. These killers, when they informed me they were hired to kill my dad, a thunder reading the word "DADDY" protruded from my throat as if I saw my dad around. Immediately they began to shoot at our door and sliding glasses of the windows splattered like water. While one was cutting my body with a cutlass but God has made the cutlass blunt that my body only swole without a deep cut.
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My mom heard my voice when I screamed daddy daddy daddy! While they were shooting my dad began to shoot from where he was. My mom who just gave birth to her last born then, opened the door and was unlocking the protector, she was saying, "My Son! No! You must kill me first before you kill my son!" Bullets were like perfume spraying towards her direction yet she was still coming for me unarmed and without a recourse to the vomiting guns. The killers saw her boldness and the hands that gripped me effortlessly released fingers, and I borrowed energy from death and disappeared into the bush. As the killers were escaping, my mom was running after them while I crouched in the bush. Until I advised myself to come out lest my dad finds me there and mistake me for one of the killers.
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Ode To My First Heroine.
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Blessed be my first heroine,
In whose womb of earth I grew
Safely in the darkest room
before the passing of nine moons.
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Blessed be the lids that fought
when my eyes had war with sleep,
And my cry, a noise to hear,
She was there with all ears.
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Blessed be the breast that fed
my hungry lips in the noon of night,
While I cried on my cradle bed
She sat and sang me a lullaby.
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Blessed be my sweet mother
When the cold of time is weird,
In her warm arms I'm covered;
Love is always living here.
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Rex Mayor Ubini's Poetry.
All Rights Reserved.

Nice one