Category: Niyi Osundare

Dapchi-happy

Laughing all the way from Chibok

Happy, happy massacres in

In crowded churches and holy grounds

 

Happy for robbers who strike at night

And bandits who defile our noon

Happy at our army’s patriotic absence

And the police who abandon their posts

 

Happy about the nation’s falling house

Its  quicksand foundation

Its shifty floor and cracking walls

Its termite-ridden roof and dreadful aspects

 

Happy about the lies

Which become our truth

Happy about the myth

That supplants our mirror

 

Happy about rulers

Incapable of thinking

Happy about the ruled

Who prefer them so

 

“Big-for-Nothing-Country”:

That is what we are sometimes called

But who does not know

We are the happiest people on earth?

Our enviable chaos

Our fantastically corrupt propensity

Our globally certified incompetence

Our preference for fast and easy wealth

 

Our act-first-think-later ‘philosophy’

Our leave-it-to-God religiosity

Our world-famous disdain for Science

Our unbreakable bond with ignorance

 

Our rabid aversion to Reason

Our impatience with the through and thorough

Our seed-eater’s improvidence

Our headless covenant with the here-and-now

 

Fifteen million Nigerian children out of school

The straight and sure way

From babyhood to bandithood

And the trail of tears that drown the nation

 

Failing factories, booming churches

The jobless join the hopeless

Miracle crowds on tenuous hopes

Predatory pastors and their phantom faiths

 

Happy through them all

Our eyes glow in the dark

Dancing and shouting in garish garments

We the owambe crowd of a happy nation

I come from the country
Of the Happiest People on earth,
Where death sells at ten for one kobo
And the Living envy the peace

Of the hastily dispatched.
Living every day on the edge of the knife
Suffering all night at the mercy of the bullet
Taunted and tossed from wall to wall

Foodless, drinkless, and faint from fright
Lean like a line from the book of anguish
Hunger has a seat in my little hovel
My growling stomach is the devil’s drum

I count the stars from my lowly bed
The lightest shower unravels my roof
When geckoes snore in my bedroom wall
The cockroaches tremble in their shining coats

I do not know when last a smile
Stumbled between my lips
A shark can shuffle through the ocean of my tears.
Sadness lives in the furrows on my forehead

Yes, I come from the country
Of the happiest people on earth
The thunder of our laughter
Rips through the ears of the world

Penorama

 

Pen these pages with the punch

Of a noble anger; tilt all ears

To the testament of screaming paper

Let no ink escape without some inkling

 

 

Sometimes sharp

Sometimes dull

Alltimes uncontainable

Like thunder in a little gourd

 

 

Compound the scrolls

With your care-less scrawls

From nifty nibs and dry-less fountain

The glide and the glow of thoughtful metal

 

 

Unleash the magic

Of the pointed thing

That spitting cobra between the lines

With trails of wit and tracts of wonder

 

 

In the daring depths

Of lateral spaces

Thought-tracks meander

Into wayward eternities

 

 

Pen those pages

With a fluent aplomb

Wreathe the universe

Round the neck of the nib