THE STRANGE VISITOR

That late fall,
We received an August visitor.
A group of white-skinned savages squeezed their way along the main stream and marched into Elegbede-Ola.
If the enemy was a cold gigantic mountain,
We were the most inauspicious climber that ever attempted an adventure to see its bare peak.
No honourable chief of Elegbede-Ola and his army  had so been overshadowed,capsized and overhumiliated before,
The enemy came full briefed and fully prepared.

Our foes have not only come as foes.
They come to deliver us out of our homes,
wipe us out of all our gold,
For the bounty harvest and coal,
To spoil off away with our livestock,
To mock the gods of the jungle,
And to sacrifice us back to them.
The hyena,our inimical friend laughs,
For they come to deliver our carcasses to him too.

Our enemy does not lift a sling nor a bow,
Neither does he hold the knife attached to his rod like we do,
But he fights with the rod all the same.
The rod,when outstretched,kills its sufferer in a bat of an eyelid,
and the demon which lives inside it leaves white aridic smoke in the air as evidence that it was present there.

But there was another;round and big as your fist,
We call them morsels of disaster,
He dishes them out to us in groups while the demon in the rod is being fed with it's food.
It beats the stubborn ounce of morale we still had to submission,
The chief of Elegbede-Ola's courage was only in his eyes.
All of us could hear each other's heartbeats slapping madly inside our chests.

It was a long one.
Bitter is the reality of loss.
All's fair in love and war.
His gods were wide awake,but ours,at noon,still in slumber.
Caught unawares,we lost as soon as it broke out.