NO MORE DAWN OR DUSK HERE
By: Yusuff Uthman Adekola (Y.U.A.)
Danjuma, despite being a twelve-year old, knew that nothing remained as it once was. A thought, like the turbulence of a whirlpool, was roaming deep within his mind as he silently sat on a raffia mat, under their green tent.
He occasionally shook his head, in rejection, as he tried assuaging his pestering thoughts. The more he tried resisting the thoughts, the further he lucidly remembered all that he tried casting away.
He remembered how he had always helped his father on the farm; how his infant sister did tenderly suck at their mother’s breast and how he did outshine his peers at school. By now, his eyes were already getting bloodshot as he looked around him and could see the old and the young looking wistfully downcast with their necks limply bent downwards.
The feeling was no more tolerable such that welled up tears found their way off his now tightly-closed eyes— tears dribbled down his cheeks. His father, mother and infant sister had gone with the booming of the bomb and the rattling of the gun. His only family of strangers left, were stricken by endemic and rather infectious diseases and were unhealthy to stay with. He thought about the nonchalance of the government and shook his head in distrust.
Suddenly, he heard a cock crow. It was dawn already—he had been lost in thought all night. He felt undisturbed by this but only heaved a sigh accompanied with the fall of a drip of tears.
He looked at his sleepless cohabitants, amongst whom are either the ones busy scratching their skins covered with rashes or simply those grabbing at their stomachs occasionally as they try to relieve hunger pangs through caressing.
He sighed painfully as he mumbled to himself, ‘Is this how we all will slowly die here, forsaken?’
He haggardly shuffled with his gaunt body out of the tent; raised his face towards the sky and again muttered as he shivered in the cold, ‘There is no dawn or dusk here, anymore. If only we could be back in time.’
WRITER'S BIO:
Yusuff Uthman Adekola, presently a student of the University of Ibadan, is a campus journalist, a poet and an essayist who believes in the correctional cum enlightening power that the pen commands. He can be reached via +2348166599760 ; adekolayusuff@gmail.com ; FB: facebook.com/adecaller01
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