Saturday, October 20, 2012
Nigeria, at Crisis O'clock
At last
We go our separate ways
The marriage that never was.
Time was
When we thought our stories were
Different chapters of one book
Has the tribal demon not woken up
Where hypocrisy slumbered?
Book people against the Book,
Thinkers against Thought
At crisis o'clock
At last
We return to the darkest past
To beat tribal drums
In praise of ignorance
The country, never a good book
Where form is wedded to content
Only conceived ironies
At last
We return to the same sad beginning
The Lugard mistake
-- Obododimma Oha
Firing from the Hips
There were poets in the army
Who chose to fight a war
Within the war, poets who penned the pain,
Poets who fired their words against war
"Fire your guns, not your poems!"
Screamed a red-faced commander,
"Make every bullet count, you dogs!"
And soldier-poets made
Their metaphors show
The shocking wounds, the battered men
The headless bodies running to nowhere,
The scream of blood against the trembling earth
Those tropes hoped to change the troops,
Hoped to pick the fragments of life
And stitch up the wounded land.
-- Obododimma Oha.
Who chose to fight a war
Within the war, poets who penned the pain,
Poets who fired their words against war
"Fire your guns, not your poems!"
Screamed a red-faced commander,
"Make every bullet count, you dogs!"
And soldier-poets made
Their metaphors show
The shocking wounds, the battered men
The headless bodies running to nowhere,
The scream of blood against the trembling earth
Those tropes hoped to change the troops,
Hoped to pick the fragments of life
And stitch up the wounded land.
-- Obododimma Oha.
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