Sojourner
O Wanderer of Distant Shores
Sojourner to horizons veiled in alien mist,
when you return on wings of weary exile,
will you still recall the twilight hymns
chorused by a thousand chirping tongues
beneath the ancient baobab’s patriarchal shade?
Will the legend of the great hunter yet blaze within your breast
he whose lion heart sent forest sprites fleeing into shadow,
who claimed the land’s most radiant virgin as his bride,
a crown of courage woven into nuptial fire?
When you return,
will the spectral fable of the wraith still haunt your marrow
that restless phantom which drove our forefathers from the furrowed earth
at the first blush of dusk,
their hoes abandoned like forgotten prayers?
Will your fingers still remember the sacred alchemy,
plunging deep into the indigo womb of Aro
to birth Àdìre patterns for our beloved mother
blue constellations blooming on cotton skies?
The marketplace yet thrums, a living hive of ancestral rhythm,
every market day as raw and rooted as the hour you departed.
Our women remain unviolated by the foreign gloss,
their laughter pure as river stones.
Our men, still wary sentinels, eye the glittering lies of city folk
with the same ancestral suspicion.
Our children wear their beauty without shame or veil,
offering it boldly to the sun and wind.
Yet the harrowing screams of our virgins still lacerate the velvet night
as they bleed beneath the mutilator’s blade
an ancient wound that time refuses to cauterize.
Will you still know the holy communion of Iyan
that silken mound of yam, pounded with the sacred sweat of maidens,
molded tenderly with Egusi in vessels of baked earth,
a feast born of labor, love, and loam?
When you return,
will your tongue not recoil from the velvet slime of Ila,
once mastered with such grace beside Amala’s dark, yielding earth?
The leaves of the whispering forest still guard our strength and virility,
their bitter elixirs weaving resilience through our blood,
though they have never promised salvation from every shadow of pain.
O sojourner,
when you return from that far dungeon of subjugation
that iron sepulchre which devoured our songs, our creeds, our gods
teach us not the hollow novelties of conquered lands.
Return instead with memory intact,
with heart uncolonized,
and lay your hands once more upon the warm, living clay of home.
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