Death, awesome in its totalitarian amour of conceit
Throws arrogant affronts in the face of humanity
Ignoring the power and the glory of memory
Our immortal antidote against the sting of mortality
Our invincible armour against all doctored history
The gentle fingers of dew drops forming before sunrise
On whose invisible wings the promise of bloom rides
Over generations of sand dunes, along the primal path
Of Ogun, pathfinders and pathmender, to an oasis of hope …
Today, men of iron have banished past truths and deeds
And decreed their hirelings into new royal legends
To be installed in bunkers inside custom built palaces
Fitted out with regulation pools, overflowing with milk –
Human milk; protected by blind, deaf and mute walls
Designed to shut out the babble of the market place
Insulate their royal highnesses within a magical comfort
From which, unhindered, they continue to mastermind us
Into the holding bays designed into their castles.
For consolation, let us tickle the armpit of memory
Awake, into gentle horses of speech on whose back
We may ride triumphant into the eternal city of hope
Submerged somewhere inside our past ruins and scope
And beyond to when kings kept faith with their subjects
and watched over the teeming masses in the markets
Listening intensely and always to bold human voices
Intuiting muttered hopes into fulfilled prophecies
Such that the people saw and hailed them as wise
Prostrating themselves, before and after, in gratitude.
Funso Aiyejina
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