VULTURES AND HAWKS
In all nooks and crannies of mother Africa,
The vultures and the hawks perch
On her fruit-bearing trees,
Today, the melodious sound of the vultures pervades
the air.
“We have come to save the other oppressed
Birds from the fangs and claws of the hawks,”
The self-acclaimed messiahs declare.
Tomorrow, before the martial dance
Of the vultures dies down,
The hawks have rolled out their jumbo tom toms,
To celebrate the dawn of a new era.
“Now, the birds can reap the democracy dividends,
They can fly around unmolested,
Not preys for other predators,” the saviours proclaim.
But whether the vultures ascend the throne,
Or whether the hawks wear the mantle,
Both are Siamese-twins.
They have unmistakable appetites,
The unimaginable vices of lying, looting, whoring, wining, dining, card-playing and
stealing.
The gentle birds for decades keep on waiting,
With shriveled, drawn pale faces,
Stomach rumpling like the clap of thunder,
Tattered, faded feathers hanging
On shrunken, wasted wings,
Their sunken eyes too weak to see,
Their patched, dry throats too weak to sing.
Their feeble songs only a croak,
As the vultures and hawks
Dancing to the drum played by their pipers,
Match with their mock shiny boots
And equally, heavily starched Agbadas
To indulge in their favorite pastime.
Their notorious craving for
Filling yawning foreign graves
With booties from the bowels of mother Africa.
Her famished innocent chicks,
Turn their bile inwards,
In anger to the unfulfilled promises of the predators,
With their long unkempt-beaks and claws,
They plunder and slaughter one another,
In carnivorous hovering, over the blood-soaked land.
THE BEAST OF BURDEN
In the modern household
Lives the beast of burden.
Her sweat turns the floor into a mirror.
Her toil cleans the pots and pans,
Everyday the camel sweeps and mops,
Yet her meals are few and scanty.
The horse is seen but never to bray,
Her coat of many colours hung on her gaunt body,
Green and yellow here, black and brown there,
Her hooves are bare with neither shoes nor ornaments.
The family donkey needs no formal training,
She perpetually stays at home to toil and
soil or
She goes out hawking from dawn to dusk.
The camel has neither rest nor resources,
Yet in seasons, the good Lord provides both for her.
MY NEW CAR
My beautiful tokunbo car,
My gleaming Belgium car,
The symbol of my power and affluence,
A credit to science and technology,
A testimony of modern man’s conquest of nature.
Wearing dark goggles in already tinted glasses,
And sound reverberating in the compact machine,
Like the sound of volcano or earthquake,
I march with shoes glittering
Like a mirror before the fiercest sun
My first day on road
In the luring speed devil.
Every car on the road a target
The mortuary temperature inside, a sweet decoy,
Inviting me, beckoning me like a shy mistress.
A burst tyre on a jagged road,
My new car flies into the air,
Tumbling down and crashing into a tree,
A heap of ugly, gaping china plates.
The mangled wrecks, the blood-oozing carcass,
Witnesses to man’s destruction by man’s handiwork.
THE BIRTH OF A CRIPPLE
The anxious midwives lost many nights of sleep
To force the precious baby out of its reluctant mother
At midnight, they heard the wail of the baby,
“We have made it,” they chorused joyfully.
The mother sat up from her subdued position,
She took a look at the baby,
She saw no resemblance of her in it,
“A monster had been forced out of me,” she thought.
She took to her heels to a safe distance,
Where she espies the struggle of the abnormal
Being and the midwives.
In the glare of the morning sun,
The jubilant saviours inspected the baby
“Look, she is deformed,” one of them said.
“What do you mean?” the others hissed.
“The legs are tiny, they cannot support the
massive body” she said lamely.
“Superstition, unfounded comment,” they said.
Laughing, heaving sighs of relief,
But their troubled eyes roam on the infant,
Lying docilely in its beautiful couch.
Many, many years rolled by, the midwives waited,
Their reddish dulled eyes could not see
Any sign of life in the feeble heap on the bed,
Only heavy breaths like a woman in labour
Escapes from the prostrate shriveled thing.
“What’s that?” One of them asked, pointing to her stomach.
“Don’t you have eyes? It is protruding”,
they answered in annoyance.
They applied every medication on her,
But her sickness defies their knowledge.
Many years rolled into decades
Their planned dream for the baby’s birthday,
To be celebrated with much pomp and pageantry,
The imagined sound of drums and trumpets,
The mouth-watering, sumptuous meals and expensive wine
They heard and saw in the very remote, fizzled past.
At last the midwives brought in a doctor,
With his beautifully manicured hands,
He placed a stethoscope on the bed-ridden adult’s chest,
He listened to her irregular heartbeat,
He squeezed the terrible swollen stomach,
A horrible howl escaped the sick woman’s mouth,
“Any hope?” They asked the doctor.
He surveyed their ashen stressed faces.
“None, except if there is a miracle
She has a fundamental defect from birth,
Her stick-like legs cannot carry her massive bulk,
Now her swollen stomach is infested with worms,
Leeches and jiggers are friends to her skin,” he said
Unemotionally, leaving the stinking sick room.
They looked at one another and shook their heads,
“We have all greyed,” one of them said.
“Decades have been spent nursing this wreck,
Her age mates are married with families,
Here she lies like an empty sack,
Still
a teething baby, mocking our sweat.”
