To Sing a Dying Song
He wired his phone to his body parts
and he can listen from every angle;
he believes he can see through it,
he thinks he can hear better with it;
when words jar in his ears like bad music,
he thinks it’s the fault of the air.
He lives his life in broken stanzas
like water bubbles exploding in the sun;
each stanza is a deposit of rubble
for the air to clear and purify.
Sometimes, he begins from the wrong end
and ends at the wrong beginning.
Yet the song is of the dying of the day
though he hears of the living waters;
not that he has the blessing of the Lord
to turn disasters into whopping miracles.
wired in his heart is this mobile phone
playing a dying song as though he’s still alive.
To Save a Country
Oil fields gleam like pebbles,
plantations of flies litter like leaves;
fruits frolic in orchards,
greens, forests, head-high hills and mountains,
sprawl in the land without barriers,
they speak no tribe, no tongue,
they have no tribal marks,
no languages of identity.
Iroko trees and elms dance with the sun,
rivers and streams sing in sunlit neighbourhood,
knowing no class, no religion, no history;
they intend to live, grow,
and glow in the darkness,
rushing to fill up a vacuum they didn’t create.
The dry season glistens with rain;
the rainy season is generous with sunshine
dancing on rooftops, chanting on palms;
there is no secret in the sky for gardens
that mingle with the stars bright
We clasp our history on our chest,
hold it warm like a thermostat,
ride into the cloudless version of our life
without a knife at our throats and ankles,
without a dagger set to stab,
to paralyse our action.
This forward and backward connection
will not lift us from this valley, but
a mere wriggling movement,
the catalyst of fracture, dimness of the light,
girders of reason in a haze of growth;
why must we obey gravity,
when we have amassed true wisdom
to thwart the adversaries of the mind?
To rise and fall is a weakness
better subdued by tenacity, openness of mind,
eyes fixed on the globe of the land,
not on the faces and marks of our brothers.
The Becoming
I saw them come forward
their hands raised above their heads,
bearing a certificate of their appointment
as the next candidate to sit for death
over those with a destiny to live,
those whose source of life is living.
They moved forward,
their faces dark, their eyes grim, closed
their lips tightened like a parcel
marked out for a distant delivery.
They had no movement except motion,
and no smile except the parting of their lips
In their hands were candles,
gleaming in the dark like yellow tongues,
like glazed, golden coffins
their foreheads pierced the night like spears
that slaughter the tormentor of their body
and shake out their grief from their souls.
They have survived their wounds,
those who fed on the garbage of the sky,
those who carried their coffins on their heads,
who ate grass and sand of the field,
but the rain struck, and there was lightning,
and they watched their sorrows scatter.