In the red dust of Benue, where the sun cracks the
earth,
a farmer bends low, his cutlass a silver flash.
He plants yam, he plants hope,
but the night carries thunder without rain
hooves, not clouds, shaking the ground.
They come with the moonless dark,
herders driving shadows on four legs,
cattle like a black river flooding the fields.
The farmer's ridges, proud as fresh scars,
are trampled flat in one hungry night.
Yam mounds collapse like broken hearts.
He wakes to the smell of crushed leaves,
to silence where children once sang.
His wife clutches the empty granary,
her wrapper stained with the red of the soil
that once fed them.
The headers
that is what they call the clash now
two worlds colliding in the same throat of land.
One man's grass is another man's grave.
One man's cow is another man's god.
Both bleed the same color when the machete sings.
In Adega, in Guma, in Logo,
the stories are the same:
a child running barefoot through fire,
a mother hiding under cassava leaves,
a father standing between his crop and the herd,
cutlass raised like a question no one answers.
The radio speaks of peace committees,
of grazing reserves drawn on paper far away.
But paper does not stop a bullet.
Paper does not rebuild a barn.
Paper does not bury the dead.
Yet every morning, the farmer returns.
He digs again, slower now,
his back curved like the crescent moon
that watched it all.
He plants a new tuber,
whispers to it:
"Grow taller than anger.
Grow wider than grief."
One day, perhaps,
the herder will pass and see
not an enemy, but a brother
whose children also cry when the night is long.
One day, the cattle will graze
where the yam leaves wave in greeting,
not in surrender.
Until then, Benue keeps its wounds open,
red earth drinking red blood,
refusing to forget.
The farmer ties his wrapper tighter,
sharpens his cutlass,
and plants.
Because to stop planting
is to let the headers win.