Who owns this land?

Bonds have been broken
Blood has flowed like a river
Uprooting shrubs and Iroko trees
Leveling mounds and homesteads
Bravery has been sacrificed
Broad chests left rotting in the fields
Honour has been violated
Shame stored up to poison every generation
The land has been laid waste
Exile has met the old and slavery has consumed the young
Strangers have wandered from afar
Lots have drawn new boundaries
New songs now recount heroes past
New stories explain the mounds now rebuilt
Broad chests stand out in these fields of blood
Bravery is in vogue again

The vulture welcomes another feast day
Broad chests will claim new boundaries
New battles will be fought in these fields
And blood will flow again
And new stories will tell of ancestors descending from the skies
The weapons will change
And bravery will be redesigned
The vulture will nod her understanding
The mounds will grow over the homesteads
The shrubs will become rhubarb trunks
And the air will yearn for new battles.
The survivors will tell new tales
Of ancestors coming to battle
And deities arriving on dragons spitting fire
The victors will mark new homesteads
And new calendars
And new festivals of fertility and the land goddess
But the rivers will flow again
In anger and in fury
The earth will reclaim her gifts
In quiet guile and in cataclysmic suddenness
The land owns the land
We, the survivors own our stories.


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