The titans that chameleon into vultures
Break your beaks upon our mountainous natures
How swift the ticking robber lurks
Around your redwoods, and peddlings quirk
Why must the parrot cease to air
The pristine courage, the mother of fear?
The crowns that wear the bench’s sole
Seek not to mend our transducer soul
The sleuth bearer of unseen contents
How long will the papers taste of torments?
The frizzling cords choke the white lungs
And the black flesh are stabbed by dumb prongs
The thrones that quizzed our three days personage
To beguile us into a haunting sacrilege
That we might say the cup should pass o’er us
For fetching the Hippocrene for our legal verse
Arrest our noble labour into the glasshouse scheme
Why this blaring over unknown, innocent victims?
The knells that silence broken voices
In wanton tolls from sceptered places
Infringe our deific stereo tutelage
Against some stainless snatchers of that privilege
Teacher, show us the labyrinth away
From the ambush of imperious stay.
Shush! We are seated at Alphabeta
Like a new pupil. Sister
Cosset us to learn this little rhyme
And absorb the simple lilting line
Composed in the smearing synagogue
Of shrewd and holy pedagogues
We are the Hermeses of grief
Stuck in strict letters brief
We are like the homeless orphans
Free slaves of waiting golden bars
Fear is the ink in our deaf pen
Talking like the Agidigbo drum, five scores and ten.
Ye heads that through our suffering lie
On your mourning cosy couch by and by
Your ménage leaned by the tyrant’s folded arms
Deploy your strongest thoughts against lifeless harms
Tutor your tongues lightly lightly to tell
The o’erlord, “Thou must quench the raging hell”.
Employ thy connate will to useful toil
Thou ought not short thy power to savage council foil
Untame your speech amid inventors of forlorn stories
Brace us, cosmic forces and timid houses
Upon an honest man’s fortune. Awake
Into the morn that shapes your restless stake.
Have you heard the sounding timbrel?
She is a dumb folk among her kindred
Will the lyricist sing without his lyre
If not to put this friend on a wise trial?
Our priests you fly your preying kite
Will you hear us sing in that silent night?
Break thy scythe, ye untamed beasts
Tear your predatory nets like wasted sheets
Ye ageless hunters of Bitter tongues
Go chide, with your gothic songs
Break thy scythe, let the tulip grow
Keep those claws, for the cock will crow.
Emmanuel Ayoola Babalola is a Nigerian Campus Journalist, Essayist and Political observer.