poème

This share of paradise, the delta of my birth,
reels from an immeasurable wound.
Barrels of alchemical draughts flow
from this hurt to the unquestioning world
that lights up its life in a blind trust.
The inherance I sat on for centuries
now crushes my body and soul.
The rivers are dark-veined,
a course of perennial draughts.
This home of salt and fish
stilted in mangroves, market of barter,
always welcomes others –
host and guests flourished
on palm oil, yams and garri.
This home of plants and birds
least expected a stampede ;
there’s no refuge east or west,
north or south of this paradise.
Did others not envy my evergreen,
which ni reason or season could steal
but only brighten with desire ?
Did others not envy the waters
that covered me from sunstroke,
scourge of others the year round ?
My nativity gives immortal pain
Masked in barrels of oil –
I stew the womb of fortune.
I live in the deathbed
prepared by cabal of brokers
breaking the peace of centuries
& tainting not only a thousand rivers,
My lifeblood from the beginning,
But scorching the air and soil.
How many aborigines have been killed
as their sacred soil was debauched
by prospectors, money-mongers ?
My birds take flight to the sea,
the animals grope in the burning bush ;
head blindly to the hinterland
where the cow’s enthroned.
The sky singes my evergreen leaves
and baldness robs me of youthful years.
These are the constitutional rewards
of plenitude, a small fish in the Niger !
Now we are called to banquets
of baron robbers where space’s belatedly
created for us to pray over bounties,
the time to say goodbye to our birth
right, now a boon cake for others.
With what eyes will Olokun
look at her beneficiaries,
dead or still living in the rack
of uniformed dogs barking
and biting protesters
brandishing green shrubs ?
The standard-bearer’s betrayed
in the house by thieves, relatives,
& the reapers of the delta crop
could care less for minority rights !
And I am assaulted by visions of
the foreign hangman on a hot Friday noon,
the administrator witnessing failed snaps,
the cries in the garden streets of the port
and the silence in homes that speak loud
in grief that deluged the land memory.
Those nine mounds woke
into another world, ghostly kings
scornful of their murderers.
Nobody can go further than those mounds
in the fight to right chronic habits
of greed and every wrong of power.
The inheritance I have been blessed with
now crushes my body and soul.
(december 2, 1995)

Tanure Ojaide, Delta blues & home songs, Ibadan Kraft Books Limited, 1997, p. 21-23.