Dad is Still Fighting

Poetry by Jonathan Chibuike Ukah

Every soldier has returned home,
but my father is yet to return.
Our town is alive with soldiers returning,
some with half-lives, others with half a body ;
some in sediment and sacks of sand;
others return in pillars of bullets and gunshots,
like the one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed.
Mother says that some acquire one heart,
as if they were born with a thousand.
T…