Category: Niyi Osundare

Tweet tweet tweet
Tweet night and day
Tweet tweet tweet
Tweet your tongue away
Tweet tweet tweet
From chatty trivia
To bombshell banter
Tweet the world ablaze

Tweet tweet tweet
From dreadful secrets
To vengeful leaks
Dig your grave with a heedless click

Tweet tweet tweet
From the most gruesome gossip
To the most egregious fib
No pause, no prudence to your Tweeter feed

Tweet tweet, Brave New Era
Of triumphal hide-and-speak
Writer, editor, publisher, all at once
The world is at risk of your limitless licence

Tweet tweet tweet
Tweet night and day
Birds now talk
While humans tweet

The sky above our head is

A ragged umbrella in need of a needle

The rain which leaks through the rupture

Is a cocktail of contending toxins

The cloud up there is a wet blanket

Dripping like a dirge upon a feverish earth

The birds fled several season ago

Without leaving a forwarding address

Prodigal saws have felled the joy

Of flourishing forests

There is a twilight stanza

In the song of the wind

Several seasons ago we sowed the Wind

The Whirlwind is ripe for our heedless reaping

The Earth we used to know

Is once-upon-a-time

(In the background throughout, a medley of Uwaifo’s songs)

By Niyi Osundare

Siwo siwo siwo siwo…

Your voice nestles in the eaves of my memory,
Its red-earth vigour tremulous
Between sappy laughter and a silence
Which left its echoes in the larynx
Of throbbing legends

Wafting past the lyrical beauty of painted thresholds,
Through doors which breast the streets
Like defiant sentries, and shrines where once
Gods swayed through the portals of the sky,
Leaving their word and wand behind

Do Amen Amen dooooo

You sing of Dawn and mysty Stars
When Earth was music
And Rivers danced towards the Sea
With a chorus of capering minnows
Your melody came before the rhythm of the First Rain

Oh that haunting sonority,
That mellow magic in the elbow of a voice!
The guitar’s wailing incantations,
Rainbow drums which prompt
Every moment into an eternity of motions

Oserie….

So rivetting, the rhythm of your Red-Earth City
Rhythm of Clay, rhythm of Bronze
Rhythm of ancient hands proclaiming
Miracles of mask and meaning
Rhythm of the snail’s millennial sigh at Siloko Market

Echoing forests, pulse of the Panther
Skirted undergrowths dense with daring
And when my Hunter-Minstrel charged
His lips with a flute
Trees broke into a dance beyond recounting

Melody Maestro,
The universe glows in the melody of your magic;
Your athletic virtuosity, the prodigy of your gifts
Unborn seasons thrive on the honey of your voice
The ivory sonority of your endless song

Joromi jo mi o, jo mi jooooooooooo….

Do you know what it means
To be kicked awake in the most innocent hour
Of night, a captor’s gun above your head
Just one huray to your fourteenth year on earth?

Do you know what it means
To be bundled into a crowded truck
Shoved, shoeless, through a thorny terrain
Your back a bleeding map from the captor’s relentless flaying?

Do you know what it means
To survive on a forced-fed fodder
On watery beans and stony gari
For sixty days and sixty nights?

Do you know what it means
To have your mate pulled out
Of the fold and shot on video
To expedite your ransom and seal your fate

Do you know what it means
For your folks to sell all they own
And beg and borrow to raise the millions
To buy you back with your shredded being ?

How does it feel
To live in a country
Where your life is so debased
And your government so unfit?