Poetry

AFP photo

By

Wole Oguntola

Labourer

You knotted and allotted this season to fate.

And tense of timbre are voices telegraphing the Earth.

You’ve snuffed and sneezed rustling brute of bubbled buffaloes.

Busy brushing the terrain of hope.

But life is broad with the narrow end of the blade,

Bluffing on blossom tomorrow.

Since this farm is a nostril of bizarre blaze,

In the free versed winter.

Labourers!

It’s a sorry September.

This farm is benighted by plough of predators

And besiege of betrayers.

Uprising

The outburst

Of the splashed River

Carrying our mandate

From here to mercury

Hurries up in haste to spectacles.

The nudity of a nulled man

Envelopes the freedom of man.

The outburst

Of the splashed River

Carrying silver and gold

Of comfort of time

Down the drain, an AFFRONT!

Uprising is a riversplash

Crushing on our landscape…

And lumbering hard endless

with bridle to cease our breath.

For the next another time

It bursts the harder,

And not bluster.

A Drumbeat In Anguish

A moonlight it was, they walked.

They worked like Rhinos, Hippos.

Won ways and path, in distress.

Pulled seventy-seven tree down in seven days.

Planted sugarcanes close mouth.

Pity…white cocks couldn’t count their ages.

It reason it well, when our forefathers,

Like great grand Macaulay

And memory of all in Sharp

Pulled piled for seasonless seasons.

NOW, very close to our eyes;

Those metal-chains on necks

Claimed kin with the mouths.

A moonlight it was, they walked,

Planted sugar-canes close to nose.

Wole Oguntola

Wole Oguntola is a poet with two intermittent swords, as well as a short story writer, satirist and critic; whose poems have been published home and abroad. He is also a member of the Association of Nigerian Authors.