Poetry

Christopher Herwig/UN photo

By

Samuel Ayoade

the epitaph

yesterday we all held a debate and a grey mother took her discourse:

fifty-and-eight years and a black boy still wears ropes around his neck

because his fathers ate the bait when they cast their thumbs against stones

like tombstones, we turn the wheels of our ballot boxes into moving ghosts

like shadows. they hunt us everywhere – as a consequence

a guilty conscience, of how we ate our very own hearts

4 cups of rice, 4 cubes of seasoning

4 bottles of oil, 4 pinches of salt

& how we passed out; our very own souls passed out in defecants for four times

later we passed on as victims of defeat and spirits in prison of our

own dangerous liberty

&

rights of speech and living reduced into a privilege

we evolved into caged birds ghosting into cacophonic symphonies of

a home shared

with cattle, reptiles and other beasts limping on two limbs…

a black woman wrote an epitaph on her own grave and dissolved

into dusty flakes of political tyranny, &, ghosted out

the epitaph:

“here sleeps and snores an ignorant race which never knew

that freedom is not the liberty of doing, but the choice to will

against your lusts

to preserve a future for progenies to live after you’ve flaked off into dusts

in quarantines, and mortuaries and tombstones”

& mother said, ours is a home ‘only’ a stone throw away from freedom

but they said, we bring you liberty – only the name of a stadium in

the Ibadan plains

but I have convinced you that freedom is not an occurrence, but a choice

and we’re all caged birds of our very own choices.

signed: a black woman in white-green coat.

Samuel Ayoade

SamuEL Amazing Ayoade BlazingPen is a Higher National Diploma graduate from the Federal College of Animal Health and Production Technology, Ibadan. He has authored several poems, plays and proses some of which have been published online and in anthologies. He has some musical tracks produced to his credit, and has acted in several Christian movies by The Pillar Films, including a minor role in The Stalker by the Mount Zion Films Production. He recently won the first prize in the Wordiators Poetry Championship 2017.

He blogs at: chrysolitewriterz.wordpress.com and samuelamazing.indonesiaz.com