A dogmatic grammarian,
a know-all, with a frog’s
face, croaks from a well.
He glowers at error-insects
with his bulging eyes.
Children gape with their
tongues stuck in rules.
Expressions hobble.
Emotions are mangled.
There’s a relief in yawning.
Ma, grandma, pa and
grandpa never learned
grammar, yet their dreams,
doldrums, squabbles,
calumnies, ecstasies, and
all other throbs of life,
sounded through their
language without inhibition.
First published in The Literary Hatchet
Woven in a lava oven and driven into the pit of despondency
Where light at the end of a tunnel dims
Parents explode and implode as darkness swamps ascendancy
Leading parents to wonder if their children curse their dreams.
Challenges in meninges and syringes singe petrified parents
Whose aspirations and predictions that wayward children tear
Their world asunder in the midst of invectives, calumnies and taunts
Drive detractors to wonder why pusillanimous parents children bear.
Influenced, incensed and unbalanced in a variety of ways
Children’s personalities somersault and assault
Parents aspirations and predilections switching off rays
Teeming with hope in a satire scope to brush aside meek manners taught.
A shaft of light sometimes in parents’ shivering shrouds shines through
As parents from their uncomfortable cocoons debunk secrecy
In conversations with sent strangers to achieve a breakthrough
That restores hope, clarity and on their torture tom-tom sprinkles mercy.
My Grandmother’s Kaleidoscope
The stones and the planks of her heart
resonate with the pick-axes and the
hammers. My grandma’s mansion
loses its head, arms and trunk.
His hidden life in the Malaysian
woods during an old war, usual
silence of the empty nights near
her granary, which was always
filled to the brim, night wind
rattling the lone window of her
top scary story, her maid’s
calumnies tickling the eardrums,
haunting forebodings, ecstasy of
the reunion… I see all in her
yellow kaleidoscope.
Broken stones and planks are
heaped up before her wrinkled
emotions. She watches all in
silence from the kind veranda
of her son-in-law. The present
is only a ghost of the past.
First published in my book, 'Kanoli Kaleidoscope' by PunksWritePoemsPress, US.
A software to read and write is not installed
in my mom’s system.
We download pages of ignorance. Sometimes,
her monitor is blank.
Our neighbors wake up hearing the divine songs
from a rural temple,
when I jump up listening to the metal words
rattling in the kitchen.
She pours calumnies into the ear-buckets nearby
from her vast tank.
There are pores on her palms, and her liquid money
always leaks through.
My dad is often tossed on her tongue. Today
the sea is serene.
I hear the roar of some unnamed anxieties
from her white shell.
I grew up on her barren lap. My tap-root
went down so deep.
I resisted the droughts. Thanks, Mom. I owe you for
all my burning blooms.
[First published in Westerly by Western Australian University]
Byword
(I)
Tittle tattle tales rattle.
Cabalistic cabals in cans:
Malicious mélange of melees.
Mummers murmur, mumchance mumble.
Mummichog: the perfidious Fundulus heteroclitus-
For this parlance is pestilence:
For your words, for their words,
For your walls, for their walls.
But for their worlds, for your worth.
(II)
Malicious mischief shrouds in mesmerism,
Whilst her malignity molds she forgot unfold.
But the morbid medalled she, instead to merge,
Maintains calumnies, which not calmative in anyway.
Mummichog: the perfidious Fundulus heteroclitus-
For this parlance is pestilence:
For your words, for their words,
For your walls, for their walls.
But for their worlds, for your worth.
(III)
A candid parley and caring suits…
Indeed better parallel match -no losers, all winners-
For cases in conformity and un-confound.
That’s peace, that’s reign, to just justice of the peace.
Mummichog: the perfidious Fundulus heteroclitus-
For this parlance is pestilence:
For your words, for their words,
For your walls, for their walls.
But for their worlds, for your worth.
14/3/1434 ___15/1/2014
©Abdulhafeez Oyewole.
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