Poetry

Spencer Platt

 

By

Fawole Immanuel Taiwo

 

 

 

IPOHUNRERE: LAMENT OF AN INTERNALLY DISPLACED LAD

 

 

From what edge shall I begin to number my misplacement

For a christening?

Or what bears the steam to erode from my heart

The permanently edified monument that will reign for aeons?

Even a solstical day will be weak to hold up my saga;

One caused me and likes by the valiant heralds of death—

The sanctimonious practitioners of their faith.

 

Like a theatrical issuance, it all sprang.

All Dick, Tom and Harry have decoded it as a come-and-go

Act of the brainwashed agents of massacre,

Knowledge-void of its come-to-stay.

How benignant it would have effected

To sever its tentacles from the scratch.

Now, I’m drifting; drifting in the cold breeze of petrifaction.

 

Where is the paternal scold?

Where has the maternal chastisement

Which restrains me from victualling on excreta with dogs

Made its hide out?

Hmm… the earth has preyed on them.

The brotherly and sisterly warmth I savour

Have exited, leaving me with indispensable heat.

My blood floods the subterranean reservoir.

 

Till what century shall nostalgia keep recurring?

Will my teary Nile ever know dryness?

Will Heavens in their frenzy ever vindicate me and ilks?

When will this desolate land ever know fruitfulness again?

Will my back ever feel the warmth of the satchel again?

Can assimilation even ever know my domain again?

Why must I be displaced?

 

From time of revel has distress been drawn.

The trepidation posed by weapon has startled my mind.

The incessant sounds of bombs and grenades

Have drained the man left in me.

Aaah… now that I needs must survive,

Where shall the pieces of my broken pitcher begin to be packed?

 

These little eyes of mine

Have discerned that which is older than them.

My hands I understand are immature,

But with them, cold-cum-stiff-cum-motionless

Entities have they felt.

My skull is full.

Even the earth is small to bear my knowledge-cum-experience;

A precocious me.

 

O fate,

Where art thou?

Manifest before me to name your deeds?

Why have you dispersed me amongst thorns?

Where have I chosen it wrongly?

Stay not mute.

Count for your act.

I am too tender to abide under your hegemony.

 

Heaven,

Is it not acclaimed that on your right side

Do children take solace?

Why must I live an exception?

Why do my counterparts in other terrains

Feel life with a contradictory sight of tranquility?

Fold not your arm to give my enquiry a feedback, Heaven.

 

I-will-be-your-father will never father the fatherless.

I-will-be-your-mother will never mother the motherless.

All strive to rip me off my worries are attempts.

All attempts to heal my wounds will only dredge it up.

Leave me to dance to the beat of life.

Let me vagabond this land till the end of time.

Let life provision me all it has to provision.

Drifting I will be till death comes knocking at my rickety door.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ABIYE

 

 

The meek and tender product of my strength,

Like the evergreen tree,

Begets me no teary eyes.

The meek and tender germination of my strength,

With iota of no weary has torrentially blossom

And make me out a shield;

Shield shielding peers with solace.

The proletariat birth of yesterday

Today makes the aristocratic gait.

 

As the magnet finds a match for its soul;

As the coffin embraces its love;

As cigarette is solaced in the hand of the White,

My magnet has found its metal—

A metal hell bent on cleaving to the magnet.

My attorney makes no meal of me;

My metals attorney makes no meal of our demagnetization.

The meek and tender birth of my conjugality

Has remained an Abiye, reigning for eon,

Unlike galore of conjugality crushed in divorce

Which has made Abiku a celebrated painting

From the crooked hands of the law-painters of disengagement.

 

Iscariot peregrinated with Jesus

But became an Abiku along the boulevard

And misplaced his soul and flesh

In Sheol and on the potter’s field.

Though a citizen of Heaven,

He becomes a persona non grata in his abode

And makes the august citizen of the restless oven.

Elisha, an Abiye;

Gehazi an Abiku.

I am the Abiye of the communion with God.

Like the diurnal and nocturnal flow of a living river,

Seducers have crossed my ethereal path;

The command-that-these-stones-be-made-bread—

Progenies of the king of Hades.

But as the Abiye I would reign to be,

I will not voyage the six feet of a fall.

The hungry hoes and shoves shall construct me no domain.

 

On the other realm of life is my craft.

Even a bird chanced to gaze at my allotment

Will sing of the life in my art.

A little splash from my craft when beheld

Could redeem the turbulent mind of the startled.

Life Pablo’s, my brush could speak of the future.

My art knows life.

Laud the Abiye of my field.

Success, success…

Success has made my craft an abode.

The Abiye of no diminishing returns.

 

All fulfilments get ignited by dreams.

Fulfilment that will experience no set back

Wants unalloyed dedication and determination.

Abiye in all spheres deserve incessant sow.

Take not Abiye as a privilege,

But in reverse,

A machine that needs must be fuelled with profuse sweat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE SLAVE

 

 

Think not of the slave

As one taken away out of choice

From the shores of his land

To work odd jobs in strange lands;

Think of the slave

As the prodigal son

Who departs his land to work odd jobs uninvited

On an estrange land.

Think not of the slave

As one whose sweat is dug

And exported to foreign lands

With ounce of no gain but pummelling;

Think of the slave

As the hand that feeds the mouth

But feeds not itself.

He’s a fool that sympathizes

The blood spilled off his shores

But substitutes the one at his door post for red carpet.

O my dear!

Think not of the slave

As one separated from his offsprings

Sequel to subjected heat from his taskmasters,

But rather,

Think of the slave

As one who funds the export of his offspring

To the battlefield of racism and discrimination.

O ye layman!

Think not of a slave

As one whose land is invaded

By unexpected locust of labour;

Think of the slave

As the Israelites that walked themselves to their taskmasters.

The slave is not one

Whose craft is styled inferior,

But one who jettisons his craft

And calls counterpart’s superior.

The slave is that one

That stimulates not his dexterity and craft

But lauds his slave driver’s crafty yield.

He barters his heritage; a cow for hen.

The slave’s modus operandi remains

Because he knows not that he is a slave.

The fetters and chains of the taskmasters

For long are ripped off the slave,

But the slave as a slave he loves to answer to

Wears himself the fetters and chains

Which weighs him down in the race of races

He is running.

Until the slave emancipates himself

From the self-worn fetters and chains,

The least remains his stance on the list.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fawole Immanuel Taiwo

Fawole Immanuel Taiwo, a poet, playwright and prose writer is a Nigerian scribe. His dexterity with the pen started at the age of eight. ‘African Or What,’ his first poem was written in 2013 and ‘Solace Place’ was penned in 2015; a poem which was written after he left Science for Art. The poem tells of his present feelings and state in Art as a penner .

Immanuel hopes to change the world with his writing. With his craft, he wishes to harness and exploit the literary opportunities embedded in the younger generation. To accomplish this, he has establish ‘Penning The Penable,’ a currently solo-writing clan. He is the poet of ‘Segilola Eleyinju Ege,’ ‘Why Not A Muslim And An Hausa,’ amongst many.

Immanuel believes that a leader is made from being a reader, and a writer, a leader-maker. The poet is currently a student of Philosophy at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife-Ife, Osun-State, Nigeria.