The Witch

My eyes watched

as her teary eyes begged:

wanting me, as adult

to come to her defense.

I looked in her face

and my head I shook:

with my very mouth,

I pronounced her witch

It was the mark:

the scar so black,

the stutter in her speech,

both things can only from a demon come

As I threw the rock a thought occurred:

her stutter might be result of illness,

the scars so black may be marks from exorcism.

As I stared at her lifeless body, a passerby asked:

‘Who has more guilt,

a suspected witch, or the one who kills her?’

By Adejoh Idoko Momoh

* The poem serves to highlight the condemnation of young Nigerian girls mostly in the South South region as witch children and their eventual lynching or exorcism. The children, thought to be witches, are abandoned, tortured and killed by their own families and communities.