Random Snaps
Let us start this week’s song
By counting the lurid colours
Of Okigbo’s “painted harmonies”
And the riveting magic of their endless music
Dance through the streets
To Ojaide’s drum
Tall like the leaping tonalities
Of his Children of Iroko
Countless reeds in the tide
Of Bekederemo’s relentless Delta
The prescience of the paddle which fore-
Told the proverb of the pen
One canoe-length from Okara’s Nun
Whose ravaged water crawls towards the sea
Its fish oil-fried, belly-up, aloud with imprecations
At cannibal oil riggers and their looting acts
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Bundles of dissident sticks,
Ofeimun’s “new brooms”
Went to work in the marketplace
A clean covenant in their patriotic ardour
When Ogundipe prompted us to
Sew the old days
She rallied every thread in the ancestral spool
And the loom which ensured our robe
* In order of appearance in this poem, references to Christopher Okigbo, Tanure Ojaide, JP Clark-Bekederemo, Gabriel Okara, Odia Ofeimun, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie.