A prayer

Photo culled from tripleeforum.blogspot.com

I pray to be borne aloft by tomorrow’s wings

And guided away from today’s malevolent selfishness,

From sights perceived only for the now, with eagle eyes

From arms that would comfort just my own,

And breasts that would feed only my children.

I pray deviation from a path leading predictably to nowhere,

Replete with gorges that swallow a multitude of dreams

And a fostered sun that scorches the soul black,

Wringing it of love’s soothing moisture,

Whilst wrenching from it kindness’s milk.

I pray the resurrection of wondrous ideas long dead,

The rekindling of noble thoughts wantonly extinguished,

That they may yet again thrive incarnated

In Vessels that will sing the songs of giving,

And dance the dance of receiving.  

The other room

I like me the feel of the other room

Of our birth, triumphs and wantonness.

A boundless space some say, of roiling va-va-voom.

A soulless place others say, of trenchancy and brutishness.

In its wallow, I am enveloped in purpose of an intense clarity.

In its embrace, an opacity and perdition

Of frightening parity.

I am surrendered to the wind of its uncertain seduction

As it charts its course of avarice and artifice.

I feel swept towards redemption from excess and unwholesome predilection,

That honey trap for casual sexism and corruption’s suffice.

In its throes I pray not for catastrophic loss of self and reason,

The other room of our centre’s miserable lack.

But rather me, love’s perpetually cheery season

which rains on us all, leaving its indelible mark.

Our truth

Would that we reached our truth quickly

On commencing our journey,

When voices like fire raged firm promise

From ramparts fortified by emancipation’s cry.

Would that our truth wove this patchwork of loose seams,

And molded our collective face, a fractured sum of its beauteous parts.

This could have prevented the disease eating at our hearts,

A hail of bullets and a million wasted lives.

Whither our truth when we hide the earth’s gift of bread

From diverted gaze?

From our slum-kissed citadels, we thrust its crumbs into the outstretched hands

Of children with hollowed-out eyes.

 Truth was left at the water’s edge when we struck an unfair bargain

For inheritance and toil.

Alas a resultant sludge of our dark designs

Has decimated life, our eternal mother.

This journey to our truth is arduous in the harsh daylight

Of our indolence.

 A disheveled multitude and I gather at an assembly

To hand-wring and feign blindness.

We are the mirror image of a few of finery, cunning

And the lore of our diverse roots

Shrill prayers and discordant testimonies.

The multitude speaks its anxiety in a medley of tongues as it asks

‘Wayfarer, do you see with our eyes? Do you dream as we dream?’

I answer, ‘With mine and the eyes of a thousand of you I see naught,

As our eyes are shut. And for the past thousand nights I have dreamed naught,

But a contorted truth, the same as our journey’.

Where memory begins

Through haze of dust and happy tears from mine eyes
I saw country in laughter and play,
And the rich slowness of life.


I heard sweet music strummed from  hills I climbed in my thoughts.
Heights, mine to occupy its  summits,
As much as it was for any that longed for it.


I heard the joyful splash from a pool of water I shared with friends
A pool that became streams, and then mighty rivers that bore our dreams,
Emptying them into a distant ocean that pledged safeguard for our promise.


An ocean that alas has become one we no longer recognize,
As surely as we no longer recognize our dreams.
An ocean that scattered our precious promise farther than we deigned to fathom.

Nigeria: ruptured heart

Our Nigeria's is a heart ruptured, a dream that has become a mirage
For the many that dared to dream,and the many that were never convinced and so have been content to see not the big picture, but the journey which at its end, is their own meager lives, their own limited hopes; their own empty beliefs...

Why the short- term-ism? Why the lack of forward planning? Why the lack of realization of this so- vaunted potential which is a tonic that does little to significantly move us forward?

We experience a poverty of thought and spirit in the midst of plenty and of corruption. An empty intellectualism when the going becomes especially challenging...

We are a young country that is doing very little to learn from history and from the world around us that is essentially as globalized as it has ever been in its history...

We live for the moment, but not in the moment......

We were once deemed a happy people for reasons that alas were not rooted in significance, but in  circumstances we rarely nurtured, we rarely examined...

Ours is a cross-roads at the present time.

Now is a time to deeply reflect on what it means to be a human being, an African, a Nigerian...

Now is the time to look critically at our relatively young history, its birthing pains, its triumphs and its myriad grave injustices..

Now is the time to examine so as to understand...

Now is the time to find our large hearts and our better selves, for we do have these if we seek in honesty and in truth..

Now is the time to begin to seriously think about a Nigeria that is not just ours and our children's, but one deserving of its place in a world where it has the numbers, the brains and the spirit to contribute its quota...

Ours can be be a great country and us, a great people if we can but see beyond our individual immediacies... Our limited individual journeys....

Ours can be a great country where our collective will and spirit uplifts us and ennobles our environment..

Pray let this be so.