The Power and Glory of Memory by Funso Aiyejina

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

Funso Aiyejina (born in 1949 in Ososo, Edo State) is a Nigerian academic, poet and playwright. He graduated from the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife where he lectured. He also lectured at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago and at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri.