Oluseyi Akinbami Poet Burlesque

The Salt Folk and the Green Valley

The Salt Folk abhorred the shore that bore them,

where the tide had swallowed field and fold.

They cursed the sea, then the graves before them,

then the word for home, grown thin and cold.

They followed the river, inland, blind,

to a valley where the Reed People stayed,

whose springs had names, whose orchards twined

with a thousand years of the hands that made.

The Reed folk gave them bread and flame,

a place to sleep, a seat, a song.

The Salt Folk thanked them, and in the same

breath measured the ground for a house more strong.

Then came the slow, soft encroachment:

a fence around a spring "to keep it clean,"

a granary where the elders once spent

their evenings, and a wall where the paths had been.

They renamed the hills for drowned towns lost,

and taught their children the valley slept,

unclaimed, awaiting them, at no cost,

while the Reed folk watched, and said nothing, and wept.

And when at last the Reed folk spoke,

the Salt Folk cried out, wronged and loud,

as though the mildest word were a stroke

and the host's own hearth a slight to the crowd.

Yet the springs kept their names, and the orchards knew

whose hands had pruned them year by year.

No fence can teach a valley to be true

to one who never learned to hold it dear.

For those who abhor the ground that made them

will find no green ground ever theirs.

The fault was never the shore that stayed them,

but the heart that fled it, and what it bears.

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