THE EASTERN SUN WILL NOT DIE

 

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 finally fell,

they said,

“No Losers.”

But we searched the fields

and found absence.

They gave us Twenty Crowns

for fortunes buried under ash.

They stamped papers

over our houses in Harborton

and called them “vacant.”

Vacant?

How does a memory become vacant?

How does a grave relocate?

Five provinces where others had six.

Five voices in rooms built for louder numbers.

Five fingers clenched

into a fist of patience.

When we spoke again —

through Rising Sun songs,

through Free Riverland cries —

Iron Serpent slithered through our streets.

Boots at midnight.

Silence by morning.

They called it unity.

We called it endurance.

Yet still —

we trade.

We build.

We cross rivers with bridges not yet finished.

We teach our children

how to rise without permission.

They tried to shrink us

into statistics,

into decrees,

into twenty coins of consolation.

But the Eastern Sun is stubborn.

You can blockade a coastline,

but you cannot blockade a people’s memory.

You can redraw provinces,

but you cannot redraw identity.

We are Riverland.

We are the marketplace rebuilt from charcoal.

We are the language that refused extinction.

And though history bent us,

it did not break us.

Listen closely —

Beneath every quiet trader’s smile

is a nation that once bled

and still remembers.

The Eastern Sun will not die.