The Nation Newspaper

Category: Niyi Osundare

  • Snapsong 114

    Snapsong 114

    Where the season’s rain has touched the grass

    A gazelle there is

    In the savannah of our song

    Whose gallop rouses the stasis

    Of these morbid moments

     

    Abundant grace there is

    In that gallop

    The magic of a rhythm

    Which surprises the wind

     

    A face so proud of eyes

    Which embrace the light

    And lips lush and lustrous

    Like the streamside pasture

     

    Quick in her thought

    Tame in her temper

    She never leaves the grass

    Without a bushel of laughter

     

    Oh you hunter with the hasty gun

    Spare this jewel and her handsome grace

    Blind brushfire of the careless season

    Steer your blaze from her happy roost

     

    Rasping palm fronds

    Acres of grassy songs

    The Universe joins the chorus

    For the Grand Gazelle

  • The Emperor and the Mask

    Niyi Osundare

     

     

    He once dared COVID’s stare

    With a naked face

    And twitched his nose

    At its frightful fume

     

    Vain and vacuous – and reckless too

    He swayed and swaggered like one possessed:

    “I am the Emperor, Death-Killer, and Stable Genius

    “My face and the mask can never click”

     

    His  rally crowds consumed his bluster

    His Governors swore by his grand delusion:

    It’s beautifully brave and tremendously free

    To court avoidable death with a coverless face

     

    He waged a war on Truth and Science

    And reveled in the realm of grand Unknowing

    He damned the dead and disdained the dying

    For dragging down his polls with their morbid numbers

     

    “Conqueror of COVID”, Super Man, Above the Law

    He forgot his cohorts in London and Brasilia

    Who derided the bug and denied its dread

    And nearly hit the pall from the Grand Old Plague (GOP)

     

    And then, five months later

    The Emperor ate his words

    And constipated so loudly on his dumb conceit

    Now the mask rides triumphant on his imperial face

  • Snapsong 112

    Snapsong 112

    By Niyi Osundare

    If Nigeria does not kill Corruption
    Corruption will kill Nigeria

    There is a new trick in our land of rogues:

    Steal and steal till you drain the  till

    And if called to account – a rare, rare event-

    Don your mask for the drama of deceit

     

    Lawmaker, Professor, Doctor, Imam, or Pastor

    None can resist the lure of lucre

    Crazy crisp notes and their tempting treat

    And Ghana-must-go’s bursting at the seams

     

    One hundred billion naira as COVID ‘palliatives’

    Half drops heavy in the Manager’s account

    And ravenous Board Members with their brains in their guts

    Are fighting deadly Corona with their viral vices

     

    Stolen, those billions reserved for our devastated Delta

    After bouts and  bouts of death and dearth

    Of oil-scorched earth and viscous rivers

    The imperiled people and their oily tears*

     

    The Minister points one finger at the Manager’s pocket

    But the other fingers are trained at the Minister’s loot

    And we the people are dazed with culpable dread

    Un-talking, un-acting as the drama unfolds

     

    The Manager faints and plays for dead

    When faced with the theft of our precious billions

    A versatile Professor, without a doubt

    And Doctor of the art of Steal and Faint

     

    *Title of Ibiwari Ikiriko’s book of poems.

  • ‘Good Trouble’: For John Robert Lewis 1940-2020

    Niyi Osundare

     

     

    A sharecropper’s son,

    He was no stranger to the buffets of Fortune

    Offspring of a caste so habitually abused

    He told his blind, demeaning country: I AM A MAN

     

    Those Forty Acres and a Mule

    Never left the page on which

    Their pledge was scribbled. The demobilized

    Hordes of ‘free’ Negro humanity

     

    Wandered, homeless, in a strange American wilderness

    Below the poverty line, below the Law

    Quarry of lynch mobs, separate, so unequal

    Their very humanity the subject of perverse debate

     

    From an abyss so abominable

    A stubborn Hope emerged

    The future clear before its gaze

    Its rousing song was Freedom Now

     

    Tear gas and water cannon served the chorus to that song

    With refrains by vicious dogs and bloody batons

    Prisons brimming with Freedom Warriors

    And the staccato rash of targeted assassinations

     

    Yours, John, is the legacy of Good Trouble

    Of boundless courage and the noble fight

    From the Boy from Troy to  the Conscience of Congress,

    Your talk was clear, your walk was steady

     

    Beyond hate

    Above despair

    Paragon of courage and candor

    Who saw the rainbow behind the cloud

     

    The Selma Bridge now wears a different paint

    Its lineaments glittering  in the Southern sun

    Even as we keep on striving for the final lifting of

    That knee on the Negro neck

    * From one of John Lewis’s speeches

  • Snapsong 110

    Snapsong 110

    By Niyi Osundare

    Hey ho what a thrill

    Grant the cops the right to kill

    Classical chokehold, karate-crush

    Pummel your prey in a lawful rush

     

     

    On the world’s highest throne

    Is a bloated Tyrant

    Who stabs our ears with his phony rant

    On his fumbling crown a glittering stone

     

     

    Two plagues there are in this our land,

    In their trembling thousands the people say

    One mows us down in its viral sway

    The other is the Tyrant and his groveling band

     

     

    Food from the hungry

    Drug from the dying

    Brazen blackmail and naked bribery

    Never, never far from his grave undoing

     

     

    The Law, he says, is a stumbling block

    Made for the weak and then the humble

    For those like him from the basest rock

    The world may tilt and or forever tumble

     

     

    But the strong also stray

    The rich sometimes cry

    The giant up the sky

    His/Her feet are made of clay

  • Snapsong 109

    Niyi Osundare

    What is the colour of your conscience?

     

    Do you know what it means

    To peep at the world

    From the mountaintop, head blissfully cradled

    In a cocoon of clouds

     

     

    Do you know what it means

    To have and forever hold

    Till your hands brim over

    With the excess of spoils un-earned

     

    Do you know what it means

    To talk and command obedience

    To be heir to a power

    Which thinks it owns the world

     

    Do you know what it means

    To be of the Tribe which divides and then excludes

    The “separate and unequal” sentries of severance

    Who bar the gate to seekers of Light

     

    How does it really feel

    To rule the world by the sorcery of your skin

    To be claimant to a regimen of rights

    So wrongly natural, so un-probed

     

    Is yours the kind of skin

    That throws open the golden door

    Or that which slams it shut in the bearer’s face?

    Tell me: what is the colour of your conscience?

  • Snapsong 108

    Snapsong 108

    By Niyi Osundare

    We breathe the same air

    We live and die beneath the same sky

    We sing different anthems

    But our melodies rally to a common Song

     

     

    COVID mocked the moon

    Re-ordered the calendar

    Tumbling budgets clash with truncated dreams

    Hours stagger into idle epochs

     

     

    Vaulting vulnerabilities, dire disablements

    Grief’s tight-textured face

    Stony syllables of the language of Pain

    Thunderous riot of hungry stomachs

     

     

    Behold the murderous pandemic of toxic rulers

    The credulous crowd of fickle followers

    The terrible visibility of a Foe Unseen

    Gory epic of a plague foretold

     

     

    But Noble Science to the rescue,

    (In its healing way, and most humane)

    Its boundless possibilities of Knowing

    That tamed the terror of the pox, then, polio

     

     

    And so here we are

    Measuring distance by the speed of a droplet

    COVID re-draws the map of our world

    Even as sunrise lingers beyond its morbid darkness

  • Snapsong 107: The Colour Of COVID

    Snapsong 107: The Colour Of COVID

    Niyi Osundare

     

    Behind the many-zero-ed figures of the fatality count

    In the welter of wails and painful pandemonium

    Which followed the obituary announcements

    There is a chilling pattern to COVID’s colour code

     

    This proud Plague had its favourite hues

    Ebony, sepia, or chocolate- brown

    And a straggling strain of white, darkened

    By cheap hard labour and paltry bank account

     

    Latasha’s Grandmother went on Monday

    Her Father followed the day after

    She too succumbed to a breathless bout

    Just six hours before her brother’s passing

     

    There is no soul in the impoverished hood

    That COVID’s carnage has not touched

    Alas, the countless vulnerabilities in the famous land

    Of the brave where none but few are truly free

     

    Almost empty now, that tenement cage where for so many seasons

    Several generations had lived and laughed and languished

    Where the moon rose every night

    On the darker part of a separate, unequal sky

     

    In its grim, Malthusian rampage,

    COVID’s demographics spot a clever plan

    History is its pre-existing condition

    With the predatory politics of the colour caste

     

    Strange, so strange,

    The ravenous appetite of this Fulminant Foe

    Its morbid disdain for those who remind the world

    That Black Lives Matter

  • Snapsong

    Snapsong

    Niyi Osundare

    (From COVID’s Book of Lessons)

     

    Death walks the streets

    The oceans swell with our frightened tears

    Was it really divined that our Year of Perfect Vision*

    Would be Twelve Months of Double Trouble?

     

    But beyond it all, our world at its most humane:

    The Healthcare Warriors who stand between

    Embattled Humanity and the COVID carnage

    With broken shields and flimsy body gears

     

    Out on their beats before the break of day

    On crowded wards aloud with pain and panic

    Sickening with the sufferers, dying with the dead

    Healing with the lucky who survive the plague

     

    Strength over stress

    Endurance over despair

    There is a virtue in our common will

    Too stubborn for a killing bug

     

    From East to West, North to South

    An Enemy Unseen now decrees

    The way we live, the way we die

    And where to lay our lungless bodies. . . .

     

    We breathe the same air

    We shed similar tears

    There is a common ring to the music of our laughters:

    So many proverbs from COVID’s Book of Lessons

     

    ————————

    *2020

  • Snapsong: Presidential Pandemic

    Snapsong: Presidential Pandemic

    Niyi Osundare

     

     

    Easter came, Easter went

    The Plague never left as the Emperor commanded

    Tombs still brimmed with bodies. The only thing

    That rose was the cacophony of wailing voices

     

    And the Emperor woke up one day with a divine prescription:

    “Bleaches, insecticides, germicides, and suchlike poisons

    Ingested, injected, and rubbed all over the body

    Will vanquish this virus and bring back our darling economy”

     

    A genius so stable, so brave, proclaimed this panacea

    To the deference of nodding experts

    And toadying state officials. A frightened world

    Saw neither method nor meaning in this imperial madness

     

    But the ‘method’, as always, is personal and ruthless:

    The forthcoming polls and the plague of power

    So, open up the towns and troop to the streets

    Better to die at work than to live at home!

     

    The fatalities assault our ears in their numbing thousands

    But the Emperor never knows how to mourn and mend:

    ‘It’s damnable weakness to sicken and then to die

    Or protect yourself from the fury of the plague’

     

    Two lethal afflictions besiege the world

    One named Corona, from the Tribe of COVID

    The other is a Grand Old Plague (GOP) from the gilded palace

    Behold how we perish from their common scourge