The helicopter crash: What the wreckage could not burn
Hmmm…
Let us dwell longer inside this grief… We cannot rush past it.
Let us sit in its ache, feel the sharpness, feel the emptiness, feel the terrible stillness; after lives have been snatched from mid-air.
In this heavy moment, we cannot just mention the word grief, as a noun and an adjective…
The truth is that we will become it.
We will stretch it, until it holds
every mother’s scream, every child’s waiting, every unsaid goodbye.
There are names, which we cannot say – not because we have forgotten them, but because saying them is a kind of death all over again.
Their chairs are still warm. Their shirts still smell like them.
Their phones still ring; But no one answers.
They were not ready to take a trip on death’s wings.
They had plans… unfinished prayers, half-written texts,
tomorrow’s clothes, folded on the bed.
They boarded a bird, which was meant to land.
They rose with duty in their chests, and did not know that they were rising for the last time.
They carried the weight of a nation on their backs.
Now, our nation wears black.
1 And the forest… oh, the forest… It took what it did not ask for.
The forest… it held them, in silence.
It did not weep.
And it did not let them go.
The sky betrayed them.
Then the earth received them.
And we – We are left with uniforms folded too neatly.
Letters unopened.
Children asking, “When will Daddy come home?”
Wives… whose bodies now ache, from sleeping alone.
Fathers… who have forgotten how to speak. Mothers… who scream, without sound.
We have run out of tears; so now, we bleed silence.
We hold grief in our throats, like unspoken names.
The saltwater from their own eyes is everywhere –
in our soup, in our soil, in the drums that we dare not beat.
It stains the forest floor, where their hearts last broke.
And still… we stood. We stood and stand together, as a nation.
We will write their names in the soil of the North, in the rains that fall in the South, in the silence between gun salutes, that were conceived in Ghana’s Middle Belt.
And we will mourn, like only Ghanaians can: 2 with drums that cry in baritone and in bass,
with cloth that clings to our chests and feminine curves, with heads bowed, but never truly broken.
© APIORKOR 2025 [7th August, 2025]
