Scars In The Scrolls

Chinedu Dike

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Monday 21 September 2026

Scars In The Scrolls

The scrolls hold all the stains of ancient ink,
Where learned scribes mapped out the desert trade.
Upon the parchment edge, the spirits sink,
As cold accounts of human chains were made.

These ledgers recorded spices, salt, and gold,
Beside the weight of every stolen life.
A price was stamped on what should not be sold,
And penned away from all the bleeding strife.

Such chronicles described the palace floor,
And praised the rulers under northern skies.
But when they reached the heavy market door,
They closed their books upon the weeping eyes.

The formal charts concealed the severed name,
Where young boys broke beneath a brutal blade;
A stolen manhood and a lifelong shame,
To serve the empires that the market made.

Those pages cloaked the lust enslavers held,
When captive daughters served in forced embrace;
In hidden dens where darker fates were welled,
And weeping walls destroyed all hope and grace.

Nor did they print how, through the sun and storm,
Grim galley slaves endured the rotting stench;
Where feeding maggots made their flesh transform,
As lives were broken on the filthy bench.

And out in wastes, weak spirits fell away,
To face a slow and lingering death alone;
Abandoned on sand roads where shadows play,
Beside the salt mines where the dying groaned.

No scholar tracked the pathways of their grief,
Or named the wilds where tortured millions fell;
They kept the charts of trade and profit brief,
To screen the horrors of this desert hell.

Yet history bleeds through every faded page,
Where modern eyes can read the hidden scars.
The desert winds erase each empire's age,
But cries of anguish echo to the stars.

The ancient highways fade into the gale,
But library shelves preserve the heavy dread.
The diaspora sings a living tale,
The grandest book that time has ever read.

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