chicken caught in the claws of a hawk
screams as loud as he can.
not that his captor might free him,
but that the world hears his voice.
The man who absent-mindedly drinks a milkshake
And thinks this adage aloud is a Nigerian exile
Waking to English mornings after red-hot dreams
Discoloured by pictures of soldiers boots
Glinting in the sun, heels hard on helpless groins.
He recalls grumbling silences at village squares
After fingers raised to choose a people's voice
Were broken by a headhunter lusting to rule and loot,
When drummers hid their drums in small bushes,
Petrified women and their humbled husbands
Herded barefoot children into disrepaired huts.
A grey time of numbing terror, when the sky darkened,
Dimmed by liberated fears, tears and confusion.
When men, yet men, gathered in small groups to talk.
Within three years diverse tongues rise
From every corner; calm, furious, and insouciant,
In meekness, sycophancy, and insurrection.
Fractured, their future mocked by oversized berets
Whose nooses and bullets have in a decade
Of brazen bloodletting, so silenced finer hunters
And poets, that they who were once men,
Can only smile passive kolanut smiles in fatality.
Those people, they see a laughable civilisation rise:
Free agency entombed. Simple needs staked too high
That crime and self trade flourish,
Pillars of ivory towers export their best brains
And fists schooled to kill raid banking vaults.
Now there is a denouement in serious crisis.
While shameless politicians, visionless, and honourless
Prepare a table for the despot headhunter,
He chose an underground palace with earth
Between his lips. Hard on this heel, the voice
Disallowed also bites the dust.
Our man thinks those who yet see the sun understand
This new chance must not be betrayed to annoy God.
But why does his stomach tighten with foreboding,
And he worries that the magnanimity of the new hunter
At the rock fortress may yet prove a sugar-coated pill? |
LITERARY 
