COVID-19 and "The Casualties"

Did you read John Pepper Clark Bekederemo's poem "The Casualties" years ago, perhaps in secondary school or during your university days? He wrote on the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970.

However, many points he raised in the poem are observable in the COVID-19 pandemic that is ravaging the whole world, particularly Nigeria.

Read the poem below:

John Pepper Clark (The Casualties)

 The casualties are not only those who are dead.

 They are well out of  it.

 The casualties are not only those who are dead.

 Though they await burial by installment.

 The casualties are not only those who are lost

 Persons or property, hard as it is

 To grope  for a touch that some

 May not know is not there.

 The casualties are not only those led away by night.

 The cell is a cruel place, sometimes a haven.

 No where as absolute as the grave.

 The casualties are not only those who started

 A fire and now cannot put out. Thousands

 Are are burning that have no say in the matter.

 The casualties are not only those who are escaping.

 The shattered shall become prisoners in

 A fortress of falling walls

 The casualties are many, and a good member as well

 Outside the scenes of ravage and wreck;

 They are the emissaries of rift,

  So smug in smoke-rooms they haunt abroad,

  They do not see the funeral piles

  At home eating up the forests.

  They are wandering minstrels who, beating on

  The drums of the human heart, draw the world

  Into a dance with rites it does not know.

The drums overwhelm the guns…

Caught in the clash of counter claims and charges

 When not in the niche others left,

 We fall.

 All casualties of the war.

 Because we cannot hear each other speak.

 Because eyes have ceased the face from the crowd.

 Because whether we know or

 Do not the extent of wrongs on all sides,

 We are characters now other than before

 The war began, the stay-at-home unsettled

 By taxes and rumours, the looters for office

 And wares, fearful everyday the owners may return.

 We are all casualties,

 All sagging as are

 The cases celebrated for kwashiorkor.

 The unforseen camp-follower of not just our war.