Bring Back Our Girls by Batsirai Chigama

Bring Back Our Girls

Us the gentle souls
whose wombs bear scars
not erased by time
Us whose hearts militants brutalize,
death they sow recklessly
our future they take liberties to destroy
time stands still
deeper each day that passes
the void erupts
to this gnawing, mad-like disbelief
like vultures in wait
silent clouds hover on the sad empty chair
as we watch the dinner grow cold
again, tonight.

Batsirai Chigama

Batsirai Chigama is an erudite Zimbabwean poetess. Her poems have been commanding audience all over African continent.

Close to You by David Diop

Close to You

Close to you I have regained my name
My name long hidden beneath the salt of distances
I have regained eyes no longer veiled by fevers
And your laugh like a flame making holes in the dark
Has given Africa back to me beyond the snows of yesterday
Ten years of my love
And mornings of illusion and wreckage of ideas
And sleep peopled with alcohol
Ten years and the breath of the world has poured its
pain upon me
Pain that loads the present with the flavor of tomorrows
And makes of love an immeasurable river
Close to you I have regained the memory of my blood
And necklaces of laughter around the days
Days that sparkle with joys renewed.

David Diop

David Mandessi Diop was born on July 9, 1927 in Bordeaux, France to a Senegalese father and a Cameroonian mother. Back to Senegal, Diop started writing at a very tender age and he was one of the most promising French West African poets known forhis contribution to the Négritude literary movement. His work reflects his hatred of colonial rulers and his hope for an independent Africa. He died in a plane crash, at the age of 33, in 1960.

Tomorrow Africa by Mankind Olawale Oyewumi

Tomorrow Africa

Our own Africa
Like others
I click thy uniqueness Africa
And every of thy positive native
Tenets I nurture till thy printable
Structure shall sail thy
Relatives, friends and loyalists
Above the burdens and havocs
Of Ruiners' responsibility
And destroyers' decency

From tyranny
Thy provenance paved thy present
In it thy agents conceived
And evolved thy constituents
But thy moral children
Oh Africa
Forbid thy extinction
In maiming mutilation
And numberless annihilation
And massive miseries

Today social distress
Guards thy nest with inferno
Opprobrium postulates principles
Thou should adopt and adapt
To for better bitterness
In this peerless
Pains Darling Africa

Even as prognosis
Discards thy sick status
Our faith and work
Shall suppress thy death
Shall resolve thy miseries
Shall desolve thy crises

Heroic Africa
Resourceful Africa
Thy doom shall reset to boom
And boom decimate its doom

No counterpart
Dictates thy deeds
Unless in collaborative
Trade for thy vision
And no child forfeits thy mission
With affective air of fake redemption

When coming moments
Demand new songs
From Wale's poetic idealism
The weighty substance
Of tommorow Africa
Shall alter my tone.

Mankind Olawale Oyewumi

Mankind Olawale Oyewumi is a philosopher, teacher (of language and literature) and writer of substance from Africa.He attended the University of Lagos,Nigeria.He has two fantastic books to his intellectual credibility--SONGS OF THE LAW,a poetry anthology and IMMORTAL INSTRUCTIONS,a compendium of his deep thoughts on life's different spheres. He is the father of SAMAFORMISM a philosophical movement called SAMAFORM ( Sacrosanct Mankind Forward Movement) and the founder of Humanity Day.

Glory Days by Bai T. Moore

Glory Days

wandered in the moonlit night
to view the glory of the past

The ruins of those pioneer days
were silhouetted against the light

where once stood mansions decked with pride
now ruled by vipers and the bats

are ‘nough to make one stop and sigh

The broken frames can hardly stand
the beating of the constant rain

And on the landscape high above
the ruins of the parish too

can tell the ghostly story plain
beneath the grass stand epitaphs

a remnant of some burial ground

A lordly cricket once in a while
will break the silence with a sound

Or in some distant woods a drum
a native feast in feverish swing

I wonder after all these years
these ancient ruins can rise again

and brighten up a dismal scene?

Bai T. Moore

Bai T. Moore was born on October 12, 1910 in the town of Dimeh, a Gola village between Monrovia and Tubmanburg in Liberia, and died in Monrovia on Jan. 10, 1988. He studied at Virginia Union University and returned to Liberia in 1941, where he served the Liberian government in various posts while writing, promoting the Gola, Dey culture and the general cultures of Liberia. Bai T. Moore became Minister of Cultural Affairs and Tourism under the government of Samuel K. Doe, a post that he served in diligently until he died in 1988 at the age of 79.

Reburying Okigbo by Obododimma Oha

Reburying Okigbo

I

One death too many, a burial not enough
Songs will suffocate the evening
A grave too weak to hold his bones

A journey not enough,
Scars on a sacred skull
Will tell the asking bird where
The forgotten flute becomes presence

We bring him home bring him home bring him home!
A burial not enough,
We bring him home to the grove
Where the navel-cord
Ropes the foot of a dedicated palm tree

A journey's not enough, the grove murmurs
For the nnukwu mmuo , will come will go will come
The poet the soldier the prophet the rebel
Always seeing things saying things doing things
So who can bury the Word finally?

II

Dead poets don't bite.
Their poems do.

Somewhere in the CO's head
The poet's last words blow the bugle,
The smell of his blood all around
Hangs heavy on the parade ground

Six marching feet in front of the victory horse
Six more calamities
And the invading army takes over the ilo
Can it also take over the proverbs & the prophecies?

The secret service interrogating the bad poem
Can it round up all the signs and their hidden
meanings?
Are elegies POWs or runaway soldiers?

Dead Okigbos don't bite
Their memory does.

Obododimma Oha

Obododimma Oha, PhD, is a Professor of Cultural Semiotics and Stylistics in the Department of English at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

Reburying Okigbo by Obododimma Oha

Reburying Okigbo

I

One death too many, a burial not enough
Songs will suffocate the evening
A grave too weak to hold his bones

A journey not enough,
Scars on a sacred skull
Will tell the asking bird where
The forgotten flute becomes presence

We bring him home bring him home bring him home!
A burial not enough,
We bring him home to the grove
Where the navel-cord
Ropes the foot of a dedicated palm tree

A journey's not enough, the grove murmurs
For the nnukwu mmuo , will come will go will come
The poet the soldier the prophet the rebel
Always seeing things saying things doing things
So who can bury the Word finally?

II

Dead poets don't bite.
Their poems do.

Somewhere in the CO's head
The poet's last words blow the bugle,
The smell of his blood all around
Hangs heavy on the parade ground

Six marching feet in front of the victory horse
Six more calamities
And the invading army takes over the ilo
Can it also take over the proverbs & the prophecies?

The secret service interrogating the bad poem
Can it round up all the signs and their hidden
meanings?
Are elegies POWs or runaway soldiers?

Dead Okigbos don't bite
Their memory does.

Obododimma Oha

Obododimma Oha, PhD, is a Professor of Cultural Semiotics and Stylistics in the Department of English at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

Letter to my unborn child by Batsirai Chigama

Letter to my unborn child

Child
I want you to be proud in your skin
So comfortable no one can convince you otherwise
Be weary of brain-pickers i would say
Those who will pick on your brains with shamboks
Like they did on the backs of grandma
In the cotton plantations
Just like your daddy
You will be gifted with brawn
But child that does not mean you are to be a slave
And when you are old like these locks
Tying my world together, at 8
I want your world to be open
To limitless possibility
I want you to be brave
Just like me when I brought you into this world
To labour for your own happiness
To strive to cut the fences, prejudices
Around the skin you will unashamedly be proud of
Child I seek you to find
All-weather wings
A heart as warm
I want you to find love
Give love
And above all, I want you to be you…

Batsirai Chigama

Batsirai Chigama is an erudite Zimbabwean poetess. Her poems have been commanding audience all over African continent.

Streamside Exchange by J.P. Clark

Streamside Exchange

Child:
River bird, river bird,
Sitting all day long
On hook over grass,

River bird, river bird,
Sing to me a song
Of all that pass
And say,
will mother come back today?

Bird:
You cannot know
And should not bother;
Tide and market come and go
And so shall your mother,

J.P. Clark

John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo was born on 6th April,1935. He is a Nigerian poet and playwright. He has written and published numerous poems and plays, some of his most popular works are Abiku (poetry) and Song of a Goat (a play).

Dear Africa by Dei-Anang

Dear Africa

Awake, thou sleeping heart!
Awake, and kiss
The love-lorn brow
Of this ebon lass,
Dear Africa.
Whose virgin charms
Ensnare the love-lit hearts
Of venturing youth
From other lands.

Awake, sweet Africa
Demands thy love.
Thou sleeping heart!

When the all-summer sun
Paints the leafy boughs
With golden rays,
Know then, thou sleeping heart,
Dear Africa stands
Knocking at thy door.

Michael Dei-Anang

Michael Dei-Anang (1909-77), Ghanaian poet, playwright, and novelist, was born at Mampong- Akwapim, Ghana and attended Achimota College, Ghana and the University of London before entering the civil service, where he served in several ministries in the colonial and post-colonial periods. He was one of the main pillars in Kwame Nkrumah's African Secretariat, which was mainly concerned with the liberation of the rest of Africa still under colonial rule. He was arrested and detained for two months after the fall of Nkrumah in 1966.

Meeting by Niyi Osundare

Meeting

When I arrive in Nairobi
I will be wearing a face
Not so different from
The one you saw some seasons ago.

My spectacles, now bifocal,
Their frames round-rimmed with the years,
Still sit on the humble bridge
Of my nose. I peep through them

Like a sage stitching the rags
Of a broken age.
You will find a moustache
Blooming patiently on the cliff
Of my upper lip.
And a mane, now low-cropped,
triumphantly salt-and-pepper
Delectably groomed.

Niyi Osundare

Niyi Osundare was born in 1947 in Ikere-Ekiti, Nigeria. He is a prolific writer and highly valued literary critic. In December 2014, Osundare was awarded the Nigerian National Merit Award (NNMA) for academic excellence.

Requiem: 5 by Wole Soyinka

Requiem: 5

I shall sit often on the knoll
And watch the grafting.
This dismembered limb must come
Some day
To sad fruition.
I shall weep dryly on the stone
That marks the gravehead silence of
A tamed resolve.
I shall sit often on the knoll
Till longings crumble too.
O I have felt the termite nuzzle
White entrail
And fine ants wither
In the mind's unthreaded maze.
Then may you frolic where the head
Lies shaven, inherit all,
Death-watches, cut your beetled capers
On loam-matted hairs. I know this
Weed-usurped knoll.
The graveyard now
Was nursery to her fears.

Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka is one the most honoured African poets. He is a playwright, poet, lecturer and an activist. He was awarded the Nobel prize in Literature in 1986 being the African to be so honoured. Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July, 1934.

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A Proud Old Man by Citambi Zulu

A Proud Old Man

They say they are healthier
than me,
Though they can't walk to the
end of a mile
At their age I walked forty at night
to wage battle at dawn
They think they are healthier than me
If their socks get wet they
catch cold,
When my sockless feet got wet,
I never sneezed,
But they still think they are
healthier than me
On a soft mattress over a spring
bed
They still have to take a sleeping
pill
But I, with reeds cutting into my
ribs
My head resting on a piece of
wood,
I sleep like a baby and snore

They blow their noses and they
pocket the stuff.
“That is hygenic” so they will
say.
I blow into the fire, they say
“it's barbaric”
If a dear one dies, I weep without
shame
And if someone jokes I laugh with
all my heart
They stiffle a tear as if crying is
something wrong.
No wonder they need psychiarists!

They think they have more power of will
than me
Our women were scarcely covered in the
days of yore,
But adultery was a thing
unknown.
Today they go wild on seeing a slip
On a hanger!
When I have more than one legitimate
wife
They tell me hell is my destination.
But when they have one and countless
mistresses
They pride themselves in cheating
the world.
Nay, let them learn to be honest first
themselves
Before they persuade me to change my ways.

Citambi Zulu

Whole Fragments by Jumoke Verissimo

Whole Fragments
For Labyrinths

On this deluge of sparseness
have my tendrils split the scales of their twining
far-far, into a distance unforeseen in the mind of mystics.

I have sampled learning from these labyrinths' secret; preserved,
drizzles of musings resisting
the heats of collective amnesia.

What if he had rained more pieces of magic sapphire?
that Okigbo
that heritage of an unborn.

Now I pore into that least of his less
discourses of all those,
I-read-him, I-read-what-looks-like-him,
I-knew-who-knew-him, I-knew-what-read-like-him.

Words of wishes have gathered greatness
into a will to swindle time,
or break wind one that carries its smell into a trillion myth
in memory of a memory that stays a memory

In yearnings I hear Silence

driving ignorance into a compulsion of assumptions
what if
renders itself an anthem, that torments our desires.

I pray and watch for Distances

But Heavensgate is a fiction when our longings are unfulfilled
how can
is the incomprehensiveness we welded a man's worth with.

I wait to break these Limits

If only I could trail this Path of Thunder

Jumoke Verissimo

Jumoke Verissimo is a Nigerian poet and writer. Her first book, I Am Memory, has won some literary awards in Nigeria. Some of her poems are in translation in Italian, Norwegian , French, Japanese, Chinese, and Macedonian. She was born on 26 December, 1979

Okigbo: Beyond the Riddle of Knowing by James Tar Tsaaior

Okigbo: Beyond the Riddle of Knowing

I know you. Without knowing you.
        The cotyledons of your poetic voice
Tore through the crust of humanity's conscience
        And conquered time and space
Before the seminal thought that incarnated me
        Traveled to the waiting ovary. My foetus.

I know you. Yet I do not know you.
        We met. During your famed tryst
With the goddess of poetry in your filial devotion
        At Mother Idoto's watery shrine.
Since, your poetic rites have held me hostage
        And sojourned in my restless, wrestling mind.

The large testaments you distilled
        With the tong of your leavened tongue;
The anvil and sledgehammer of your circumcised mind
        Have moulded nubile images in the caverns
Of our serrated, wounded and whimpering memories.
        But alas. You hugged the portentous leopard-skin
War drums and followed the path of thunder
        And embraced the streaks of lightning
A votive sacrifice to an unknown and unknowable
        Greedy god that has refused to be immolated.

You still are the burden of our creaking boulder
        Town crier, still announcing the adolescent dawn
Like the muezzin-cockerel. You still proclaim, prophet
        In apocalyptic accents the crime of the stolen dream.

Now, I know you. Beyond the riddle of knowing.
Your haunting metaphors.
Your seductive similes.
Your pregnant tropes.
Eternal graffiti etched
On the nudity of a textured lives.

James Tar Tsaaior

James Tsaaior is an Associate Professor, is the chairman of the Mass Media and Writing Department, School of Media and Communication, Pan- African University, Lagos, and Director of Academic Planning at the university, where he teaches creative writing and media studies. He was a visiting research fellow, Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge, UK.

The Tree by Christopher Okigbo

The Tree

THE ROOT has struck
A layer of rock;

The sap dries out in the stem
Upwards:
The blood dries out in the vein
Like sap

Christopher Okigbo

Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo was born in 1930. He was a Nigerian poet and he is today widely acknowledged as the outstanding postcolonial English - language African poet and one of the major modernist writers of the twentieth century. He died in 1967 while fighting for the independence of Biafra.

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Your presence by David Diop

Your presence

In your presence I have rediscovered my name
My name that was hidden so long under the pain of separation
I have rediscovered the eyes no longer veiled with fever
And your laugther like a flame piercing the shadows
Has revealed Africa to me beyond the snows of yesterday
Ten years my love
With days of illusion and abandoned ideas
And sleep restless with alcohol
Ten years of suffering poured on me from the world' s breath
Suffering that burdens today with the taste of tommorow
And turns love into a boundless river
In your presence I have rediscovered the memory of my blood
And the necklaces of laugther hung round our days
Days sparkling with ever new joys .

David Diop

David Mandessi Diop was born on July 9, 1927 in Bordeaux, France to a Senegalese father and a Cameroonian mother. Back to Senegal, Diop started writing at a very tender age and he was one of the most promising French West African poets known forhis contribution to the Négritude literary movement. His work reflects his hatred of colonial rulers and his hope for an independent Africa. He died in a plane crash, at the age of 33, in 1960.

Africa by David Diop

Africa

Africa my Africa
Africa of proud warriors in ancestral savannahs
Africa of whom my grandmother sings
On the banks of the distant river
I have never known you
But your blood flows in my veins
Your beautiful black blood that irrigates the fields
The blood of your sweat
The sweat of your work
The work of your slavery
Africa, tell me Africa
Is this your back that is unbent
This back that never breaks under the weight of
humilation
This back trembling with red scars
And saying no to the whip under the midday sun
But a grave voice answers me
Impetuous child that tree , young and strong
That tree over there
Splendidly alone amidst white and faded flowers
That is your Africa springing up anew
springing up patiently , obstinately
Whose fruit bit by bit acquires
The bitter taste of liberty.

David Diop

French (Original language of the poem)

Afrique mon Afrique
Afrique des fiers guerriers dans les savanes
ancestrales
Afrique que me chantait ma grand - mère
Au bord de son fleuve lointain
Je ne t’ai jamais connue
Mais mon regard est plein de ton sang
Ton beau sang noir à travers les champs répandu
Le sang de ta sueur
La sueur de ton travail
Le travail de l’ esclavage
L’esclavage de tes enfants
Afrique dis - moi Afrique
Est- ce donc toi ce dos qui se courbe
Et se couche sous le poids de l’humilité
Ce dos tremblant à zébrures rouges
Qui dit oui au fouet sur les routes de midi
Alors gravement une voix me répondit
Fils impétueux cet arbre robuste et jeune
Cet arbre là - bas
Splendidement seul au milieu de fleurs blanches
et fanées
C’est l ’Afrique ton Afrique qui repousse
Qui repousse patiemment obstinément
Et dont les fruits ont peu à peu
L’amère saveur de la liberté.

David Diop

David Mandessi Diop was born on July 9, 1927 in Bordeaux, France to a Senegalese father and a Cameroonian mother. Back to Senegal, Diop started writing at a very tender age and he was one of the most promising French West African poets known forhis contribution to the Négritude literary movement. His work reflects his hatred of colonial rulers and his hope for an independent Africa. He died in a plane crash, at the age of 33, in 1960.

Dear SAMAFORM by Mankind Olawale Oyewumi

Dear SAMAFORM

Out of His mercy
Who formed me
I formed thee to
Have the world reformed
By the power of providence
I proffered the path
That thy destiny takes
Tomorrow
Forever
For the cute confederation
Of a world wildly willed for love
My precious samaformism
Which my mortal finitude
Nurses conforms not with
The selfhood of acts
That survive on evil
In relentless topple
Of demonic destroyables
That glory in the universe
Of terror and trauma
Thy goal is to gaol
The achievements
Of the devil's chiefs
And while you for
Justice cater from
Limited parentage
And serial merits
The juice in the blood
Of the slaughtered fauxpas
Shall not in conspiracy
Camp thy conscience
Or in ambitious despiracy
Weaken thy strength

SAMAFORM
Thou shall deliver the
Race of man from the
Flowing flood of destructive
Dystopia which incapacitates
Their words and decapitates
Their ways
With it their parental
Ledger is of ethical
Motherhood retrenched
Moral is the soul of hereafter
Justice the engine of its journey
Thy duty still is making decency
The belonging of the world
And fairness the jewel of its end
You hold the key to free
Their feelings
Liberate their thoughts
And reform their practices
From the patronage of prejudices
Which way-lay their fulfillment
And welcome their miseries
Based on the infinite truth
That our species is one
Bribery is below thy honor
Derailment unworthy
Of thy avocation
Whether featured or fanned
Out by the directory of the world
Thy task is to
Make the world
Its only hope thou
Clearly constitute
Do not fail

Oh SAMAFORM {!}
God always thy power
Samaforism forever they propeller
Our Directorates provide the how
When the world's woes
Humiliate the huge scale
Of the devils manifestoes
Samaformism shall sail
On the virulent waters
Of smooth reforms
And the major meaning
Of creation shall maim
The twin misanthropies
Of squandered ages
Oh SAMAFORM {!}
This thy proper
Place points!?

Mankind Olawale Oyewumi

Mankind Olawale Oyewumi is a philosopher, teacher (of language and literature) and writer of substance from Africa.He attended the University of Lagos,Nigeria.He has two fantastic books to his intellectual credibility--SONGS OF THE LAW,a poetry anthology and IMMORTAL INSTRUCTIONS,a compendium of his deep thoughts on life's different spheres. He is the father of SAMAFORMISM a philosophical movement called SAMAFORM ( Sacrosanct Mankind Forward Movement) and the founder of Humanity Day. 

Building the Nation by Henry Balow

Building the Nation

Today I did my share
In building the nation.
I drove a Permanent Secretary
To an important urgent function
In fact to a lunch at the Vic.

The menu reflected its importance
Cold bell beer with small talk,
Then fried chicken with niceties
Wine to fill the hollowness of the laughs
Ice-cream to cover the stereotype jokes
Coffee to keep the PS awake on return journey.

I drove the Permanent Secretary back.
He yawned many times in back of the car
Then to keep awake, he suddenly asked,
Did you have any lunch friend?
I replied looking straight ahead
And secretly smiling at his belated concern
That I had not, but was slimming!

Upon which he said with seriousness
That amused more than annoyed me,
Mwanainchi, I too had none!
I attended to matters of state.
Highly delicate diplomatic duties you know,
And friend, it goes against my grain,
Causes me stomach ulcers and wind.
Ah, he continued, yawning again,
The pains we suffer in building the nation!

So the PS had ulcers too!
My ulcers I think are equally painful
Only they are caused by hunger,
Not sumptuous lunches!

So two nation builders
Arrived home this evening
With terrible stomach pains
The result of building the nation –
– Different ways.

Henry Balow

Henry Muwanga Balow was born on 1st May, 1929. He was a renowned and celebrated Ugandan poet and one of the recipients of the Uganda Golden Jubilee medals in 2013. He died on 20th August, 2006.

In The Small Hours by Wole Soyinka

In The Small Hours

Blue diaphane, tobacco smoke
Serpentine on wet film and wood glaze,
Mutes chrome, wreathes velvet drapes,
Dims the cave of mirrors. Ghost fingers
Comb seaweed hair, stroke acquamarine veins
Of marooned mariners, captives
Of Circe's sultry notes. The barman
Dispenses igneous potions ?
Somnabulist, the band plays on.

Cocktail mixer, silvery fish
Dances for limpet clients.
Applause is steeped in lassitude,
Tangled in webs of lovers' whispers
And artful eyelash of the androgynous.
The hovering notes caress the night
Mellowed deep indigo? still they play.

Departures linger. Absences do not
Deplete the tavern. They hang over the haze
As exhalations from receded shores. Soon,
Night repossesses the silence, but till dawn
The notes hold sway, smoky
Epiphanies, possessive of the hours.

This music's plaint forgives, redeems
The deafness of the world. Night turns
Homewards, sheathed in notes of solace pleats
The broken silence of the heart.

Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka is one the most honoured African poets. He is a playwright, poet, lecturer and an activist. He was awarded the Nobel prize in Literature in 1986 being the African to be so honoured. Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July, 1934.

Born in These Times by Lillian Aujo

Born in These Times

I’m told of a time
When houses were deserted
And bushes were havens, by night.
Babies’ mouths were plugged
By nipples – sore with welts
From infants’ starved and teething gums
Mothers bit on their lips – drew blood
Anything to muffle the babies’ cries – meld with the night
It was the only way of the times.
In those times, thoughts and breath were borrowed
And short. Triggers, barrels, bullets, singed the skin
Of life. Living was a privilege for those who understood
That other than sugar, salt and soap other things
Also. Had to be bought.

So now I am told I should be grateful for now,
For now that I can shut the lids of my eyes and
Let. My thoughts rest with the peace that comes with night
Now when I can forget that my thoughts roam
In the hoax of hollow excesses. My brain struggles
To wrap itself around ideas like Freedom. A thing
Given. By powers that be and the lids
Of my conscience will not slide open. Failing to
remember that point in time
When history wrote that my freedom wasn’t my own
But something to be deserved, a chattel at a price …

I should sit! Listen to the chatter of crickets and toads by night
From the environs of my lighted warm house.
I should take a self imposed excursion to check on wild life,
Since the luxury to enjoy the aesthetics of being is also mine
To enjoy. In these times of safety and cushioned ease
Of sugar for my tea and soap for my clothes
Of pharmaceutical meds chocking shelves
Oh! I can also now make a choice
Between butter, jam, or margarine, for my bread
Haven’t you heard?
That I was born in times where I can speak my mind
Decide who to vote or whom not to.

So why am I not satisfied with these times?
They ask of me!
Am I that gluttony of a fly,
Sitting contentedly on a mound of shit
Bored by the commonness of faecal matter
Rubbing my feelers for the elixir of nectar
Aspiring to be the glutinous bee?

I would like to say I am grateful to be born in these times,
When melding with the night is far from my thoughts,
And they and my breath are my own
That I am not the fly who aspires to be the bee
But I will not say I am grateful to be born in these times.

Lillian Aujo

Lillian Aujo is a Ugandan author. In 2009, She was the first winner of the first BN poetry prize by Babishai Niwe (BN) Poetry Foundation . In 2015, she was longlisted for, and won the Inaugural Jalada Prize for Literature for her story "Where pumpkin leaves dwell".

For He was a Shrub among the Poplars by Christopher Okigbo

For He was a Shrub among the Poplars

For he was a shrub among the poplars
Needing more roots
More sap to grow to sunlight
Thirsting for sunlight
A low growth among the forest.
Into the soul
The selves extended their branches
Into the moments of each living hour
Feeling for audience
Straining thin among the echoes;
And out for the solitude
Voice and soul with selves unite
Riding the echoes
Horsemen of the apocalypse
And crowned with one self
The name displays its foliage,
Hanging low
A green cloud above the forest.

Christopher Okigbo

Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo was born in 1930. He was a Nigerian poet and he is today widely acknowledged as the outstanding postcolonial English - language African poet and one of the major modernist writers of the twentieth century. He died in 1967 while fighting for the independence of Biafra.

Violent Love by Harriet Anena

Violent Love

We love violently
Cry and kiss at the same time
As our chests heave with want and hesitation
We feel extravagantly
Run to heaven and hell at the same time
As our reconciliation bleeds with desperation and collectedness
And we are on heat
Like a cow battling a dose of artificial stimulator
Then we stop, breathe and conquer these militant things within

Harriet Anena

Harriet Anena is a Ugandan author, poet, and journalist. She is the author of a collection of poems, "A Nation In Labour". She graduated with a Bachelor of Mass Communication degree at Makerere University in 2010 and completed an MA Human Rights from the same institution in 2015.

Dedication by Wole Soyinka

Dedication
for Moremi

Earth will not share the rafter's envy; dung floors
Break, not the gecko's slight skin, but its fall
Taste this soil for death and plumb her deep for life

As this yam, wholly earthed, yet a living tuber
To the warmth of waters, earthed as springs
As roots of baobab, as the hearth.

The air will not deny you. Like a top
Spin you on the navel of the storm, for the hoe
That roots the forests plows a path for squirrels.

Be ageless as dark peat, but only that rain's
Fingers, not the feet of men, may wash you over.
Long wear the sun's shadow; run naked to the night.

Peppers green and red—child—your tongue arch
To scorpion tail, spit straight return to danger's threats
Yet coo with the brown pigeon, tendril dew between your lips.

Shield you like the flesh of palms, skyward held
Cuspids in thorn nesting, insealed as the heart of kernel—
A woman's flesh is oil—child, palm oil on your tongue

Is suppleness to life, and wine of this gourd
From self-same timeless run of runnels as refill
Your podlings, child, weaned from yours we embrace

Earth's honeyed milk, wine of the only rib.
Now roll your tongue in honey till your cheeks are
Swarming honeycombs—your world needs sweetening, child.

Camwood round the heart, chalk for flight
Of blemish—see? it dawns!—antimony beneath
Armpits like a goddess, and leave this taste

Long on your lips, of salt, that you may seek
None from tears. This, rain-water, is the gift
Of gods—drink of its purity, bear fruits in season.

Fruits then to your lips: haste to repay
The debt of birth. Yield man-tides like the sea
And ebbing, leave a meaning of the fossilled sands.

Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka is one the most honoured African poets. He is a playwright, poet, lecturer and an activist. He was awarded the Nobel prize in Literature in 1986 being the African to be so honoured. Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July, 1934.

My Home by Mulumba Matia

My Home

This is my home Uganda.
This is the land for me.
This is the place where my heart is at rest.
This is the land for all that is the best.
Here I am alive and free.

This is my home Uganda.
With mountains, with valleys and hills.
The deep dark forest where nobody goes.
The thick green swamps where the wide Nile flows.
The western lakes strange and still.

This is my home Uganda.
Full of the flight of the birds.
The Crested Crane, the Eagle and Dove,
Spinning their cries to the sky up above.
Music of songs with words.

This is my home Uganda.
Full of beasts that God made.
The golden Lion and swift-footed Deer,
The Elephant grey and black is here
And the Leopard who lies in the shade.

This is my Country Uganda.
Here I was born and I will die.
Here is the house I built with my hands,
The trees I planted, the crops on my lands
Grow fruitful beneath a blue sky.

Mulumba Matia