Three more exclusive poems from my collection

POVERTY

We marched on in silent procession

As the chilly early morning cold

Bruised our shy skins,

My father and I trekking

To the farmland behind our house;

A whooping two miles away.

It’s a subsistence community,

Everyman fends for his own,

Even as farming sat on the high walls,

Overseeing all other economic ventures.

“No food for the lazy man” was the motto.

With every impact of my hoe against the metallic soil,

Sweat immersed my naked skin,

Like one just through with his baptismal,

Even as my brow furrowed in exhaustion,

Helplessness and dejection.

Exhaustion at this continued futile attempt to make

ends meet,

Helplessness from my father’s hoarse order

to keep on the brutal attacks on the poor soil,

even though I was grasping for scarce breath

and dejection at knowing that the yield

Does not deserve the labor.

But Alas! That was our fate –

We were society’s poorest,

and therefore owned the most wretched of lands.

LAGOS

Buzzing folks all around.

Beeping cars on the streets,

The bumps and thumps of motorists

And pedestrians alike.

Everyone shuffled briskly along

Obviously oblivious one to the other.

Cries of babies,

Howls from commercial motorists,

Screams from those alarmed at the stunts performed by

Commercial motorcyclists popularly called “okada”.

Violent pushing and shoving by pertinacious passengers

Boarding a bus, even as abuses were rained on those lucky enough to board,

and their anger at not being able to return the favor.

All these make the city what it is, “a den of hustlers, nay rustlers”.

Here we know not the weak, feeble, pregnant or infirmed,

Everyone is an island of his own

“Love your neighbor” does not apply here,

As everyone grapples with the reality

Of Darwin’s centuries old survival philosophy tagged

“Survival of the fittest” while the weak dies off.

KISMET

Time discerns everything,

But time flies.

How long? Is a matter of how patient?

‘Turn by turn’ they say life is,

But alas I would rather cape Diem,

Cause I have seen so many of life’s crueltesque

The bastard owns a bag full of in-exhaustible tricks.

Alas while others never had a time,

The time of others came mocking when they

Already owned fiefs at the graveyard.