Freedom fighter

Through boom and bust,

Remain steadfast as a rock.

Through heat, haze and dust

And uncertainty’s mock,

Remain unwavering, undeterred,

For we travel the twilight zone

Of a throng confused and ill-prepared,

But Sitting pretty on power’s throne.

 Hold their views uncomfortable sway

The bit between their teeth, a stranglehold.

Our ideas are their ready prey,

The manner of hope’s suffering, a sad manifold.

Stand strong and shine those eyes already keen,

Prevail you must, what choice have we got?

Pray, do full justice to where you’ve been

And deliver lasting victory, sweet and hard-fought.

Ours is an unwieldy country

Ours is an unwieldy country.

Huge is our land mass, disparate are our peoples.

We are a multitude of vociferous tongues,

That wail a cacophony of philosophies

From the false safety of our gaggle of alliances.

We defend our corners with jealous zest,

Even as we search in the dark

For the light at the end of a dark tunnel of our hewing.

We metamorphose as life insists we must, and yet

We fail to bow to the demand of evolution.

Evolution comes at a price we are reluctant to pay,

For inherent in it is a demand

 That our beliefs must distil into a conviction

That redeems our mistrust and frees us from paranoia.

Hear Hear brother! Conviction calls us from the depths

Of mother country of troubled birth.

Hear Hear sister! Conviction demands we sing

A mellifluous song of hope to our children,

A song that exhorts to service and cheers to unity.

Asoebi

Asoebi is a dream, birthed into a world

Of ankara, lace and guinea.

 It is rich fabrics of sage green and royal purple,

And torsos sculpted for occasion,

Enveloped in spangled baby pink,

 Burgundy and burnt gold.

Asoebi are ideas that find wondrous expression

In diadems of fila and the crowning glory of gele.

It is that which achieves concretisation

In the thoughts and hushed conversations

 Of excited sisterhoods and neurotic mothers.

Asoebi is an explosion of celestial blue and dazzling azure

Brought into being by eager pockets

With furrowed brows.

It is the submission to iro and buba,

Tailored to the glory of curves

Elevated on Louboutins and the like.

Asoebi is the unflinching herald of uniform, family

And life’s close friendships…

It is the promise that rose red will again be embellished

With beautiful neck pieces, waxy smiles

And pouts haughty, as well as demure.

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.