Category: Niyi Osundare

“O to gee…*”
A new anthem mounted the wind
Like a clarion with a caustic clamour
The people chanted it in their bedrooms

The marketplace rocked to its song
School yards swelled its rising strain/tide
O to gee. . . . .
The pigeon heard and told the partridge

The King is dead
Long dead the King
The dynasty which held the leash for so many seasons
Is finding something rope-y around its own neck

Spoilt beyond decay
Arrogant beyond compunction
With that deadly born-to-rule virus
That has so rifled our body-politic

Where now are his untouchable thugs
Where now goes his pampered militia
Who blatantly rob the banks
While its sponsor robs the State?

Gone is the Senate King
Gone, his stolen crown
Those who stole our pestle
Will forever stoop without bending

O to gee. . . . .

(O to gee. . . .Bad Bye to the Senate King)

They crushed the King

In his native den

Behold his stolen crown

In the startled dust

 

 

Wonder upon dreadful wonders

The long-sought day is here, at last

The King’s lofty head is bald and bare

The sun makes a mirror of his glittering pate

 

 

Thief and traitor with a heart of stone

He stole that crown in the dead of night

In league of scoundrels and fellow felons

They trampled the Law and cooked the books

 

 

Callous, a-moral, immune to shame

His reign drenched the land in lawless ruin

In his fast and clever hand

The gavel was blighted by graft and grease

 

 

Blinded by ambition, deafened by greed

Slave to an Ego far larger than Sense

Born into wealth of dubious means

He built a bank and robbed it dead

 

 

The King of Senate has lost his crown

The one he wore to defy our will

The tree has fallen in the Evil Forest

Behold the maggots in its malignant fruit

(To the accompaniment of gentle, suggestive drumming and singing)

Ah, rogbodiyan, pabambari

Pabambari, igi da!

Abere bo l’owo adete

O d’ete***

 

 

The day wore on

And the greasy siege continued

Each Finger fought and fretted

But their foe dug deeper into

The gap between their ranks

 

 

Then

A ray of wisdom lit up

The jungle of the squelching warriors.

Each dropping its blinding pride,

TOGETHER, the Fingers closed their ranks

And grabbed Soap and routed their oily foe

 

TOGETHER.

 

 

  * She with egg-like eyes; She with the sunny smile

** The hand’s smallest finger

*** Ah, turmoil, prodigious turmoil

Turmoil, prodigious turmoil

The needle drops from the leper’s hand

Picking it up becomes a desperate act.

 

              Concluded.

 

 

       Ni Soki*       

 

The Have-Alls say

To the Have-Nots:

 

Sound the trumpets

Roll out the drums

 

Let us sing the anthem

Of our Commonwealth

 

 

*In Short   

(To the accompaniment of gentle, suggestive drumming and singing)

Eleyinju-Ege, Elerin-Eye*

Delicate, supple, like a yam tendril in June,

The Fourth Finger shouted her own endowments:

“Butterflies who think they are eagles”,

She taunted the other fingers,

“Crude, colourless columns of joints and bones;

Behold here, the bright and buxom bride;

Behold my blessings and tremble!

Or do you think it is just for fun

That people trust me with their wedding ring?”

 

The blind boast continued

The vain, inglorious campaign

 

But Omodindinrin** watched the battle

From the periphery of the Palm

In head-shaking amusement

Without a single word. . . .

 

And soon, very soon,

Palm Oil crashed in

With a battalion of greasy vandals,

Soaking all the braggarts

In a stubborn and humbling sludge.

 

Each Finger called Soap, the Saviour,

Soap answered but couldn’t foam

Each struggled to grab a bar

But the cleansing magic danced

Into teasing distance.

 

• To be continued

 

RIDDLE

I’m loudest

When I’m silent

 

I’m happiest

When I’m red

 

What am I?

(A Valentine’s Garden of Sighs)

Since last season

When I sang you the song

That stoked the fire

In the hearth of our memory

 

Many rains have fallen

Much dust has powdered the season’s face

The Flowers of Paradise have

Bloomed in our vase of prayers

 

I took your voice

To the river behind our vow

Oluodo* rewarded my journey

With a school of singing minnows

 

I gave your name

To the hills. The echo came

Back as bread and butterflies

Then vials of timeless honey

 

I have sown my sighs

In your Garden of Silence

And harvested baskets of laughter

And tingling tango in sacred places

 

Another season here

And the air perfumed with songs

Let us tease the night with

The magic of your absent moon

 

• Goddess of the River

(To the accompaniment of gentle, suggestive drumming and singing)

Once upon a time

When the eye stayed behind the head

And the world walked around on its very head

 

A quarrel there was

Among the fingers

 

“I am god, king, patriarch of the Palm”,

Swaggered the Thumb,

Without me, let anyone try to grab

The handle of the machete!

I rule the hand from my separate island”

 

“I am the indisputable Prince of the Palm”,

Proclaimed the Index Finger,

“Pathfinder, arrow-head, name-caller,

And stubborn sage of calculated rudeness;

Without me what tool can so deftly

Pick the itchy nose?”

 

“Say what you will”,

Added the Middle Finger,

Shout your idle praises

Till your boastful throats

Choke from childish excess;

I am the head which predates the hair,

The gallant spear which stalks the deer

Before the hunter’s coming;

I am the giant of the Hand”

 

• To be continued…………

 

RIDDLE

If you have too little of me

Your night will be full fright

If you have too much

Your day will drown in excess

 

What am I?

Dare to be different (2)

Dare to be different

Cut through the clutter

Of suffocating clichés

Say it fresh, do it free

 

Dare to be different

Unearth the truth

In every lie

The lie in every truth

 

Banter with the Bible

Cavil with the Quran

Engage  Benevolent Buddha

In questions and running counters

 

Trouble the water

Distrust the mirror

Bury wayward Death

In graves unmarked

 

Un-let the leash

Don’t let sleeping dogs

Lie their way

To rabid silence

 

Dare to be different

Let courage send you

On endless errands. Excise

The cyst in the moribund system

Dare to Be Different (1)

 

Dare to be different

Push the dream to an end

Without end, beyond night’s nescience

Beyond the mystery of the mist

 

Dare to be different

Cut a path through

The jungle of compliant thorns

Stand Custom on its head

 

Dare to be different

Damn wagging tongues

And the malicious arrows

Of peering eyes

 

Dare to be different

No fickle follower

Nor tyrant leader

But one link in a horizontal chain

 

Dare to be different

Flow uphill like a rapid river

Farm green acres

In the valley of the sky

 

Dare to dream

Like the architect

Who lives all seasons

In houses yet unbuilt

(Let Distribution Undo Excess)

“So distribution should undo excess. . . “*,

Proclaimed good Old Willy

Bard of unfathomable insight

‘Communist’ by most prodigious impulse

 

‘Marxist’ two centuries

Before Marx’s momentous coming

He was progenitor of a mighty mindline,

A moral intelligence un-bound

 

By either time or place.

Golden insight from the hea(r)th of common justice

Forever shining in whatever sky

It is touched by a native sun

 

Tortured truth from the travails

0f a King who stumbled when he saw,

Who once possessed so much,

Now possessed by ‘nothing’

 

This nugget is child of the hottest forge

Where wild winds stoked the blaze

And the flame lit the darkness

Of Fortune’s rude and reckless hostage

 

“So distribution should undo excess”,

Quoth he, the Bard of Avon;

Fiery war cry now in the ears of those who

Ignore its wisdom and conjure its fear

 

• Full quote: “Distribution should undo excess/And each man have enough”. From Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act 4, Scene 1.