Ikechukwu frank

 

  THE EASTERN SUN WILL NOT DIE By Ikechukwu Frank  They came for us before dawn learned how to speak. In the markets of the Northwind Plains, in railway yards of Iron Junction, we were counted — not as neighbours, but as numbers to be erased. Fires translated hatred into a language of smoke. Doors kicked open. Names torn from signboards. The earth drank what it should never have tasted. We ran — not because we were weak, but because survival is sometimes the only rebellion left. Back to Riverland. Back to the soil that remembered our footsteps. Back with stories too heavy for children to carry. Then came the thunder of One Nation. Colonel Orion raised a trembling flag; General Tarex answered with iron. The sky forgot its colour. Silver Crossing became a whisper. Markets turned to dust. The sea closed its mouth. The land swallowed its harvest. Hunger grew taller than trees. Mothers measured hope with empty bowls. Children learned the mathematics of bones. And when silence final...

  WHEN THE RIVER REFUSED TO FORGET By Ikechukwu Frank  The river was not water that morning. It was a mirror. And the sky bent low enough to watch men become numbers. The town did not wake — it held its breath. Boots crossed the bridge like thunder learning to walk. Steel spoke in a language that did not need translation. The marketplace closed its eyelids. Palm trees stiffened like witnesses summoned without consent. They called it an assembly. But the earth knew it was a subtraction. Fathers stood in rows, shoulder to shoulder — not as soldiers, not as rebels, but as names that once answered to laughter. Teenage boys tried to grow beards in a single morning. Mothers swallowed screams until their throats tasted of iron. The sun rose — and wished it had not. Gunfire tore the alphabet from the air. Dust leapt up to shield the fallen. And the ground, overwhelmed, began to memorize. More than a thousand heartbeats fell into silence. Some say two thousand. But grief does not count...