To Christopher Okigbo
To Chinua Achebe
To Wole Soyinka
To JP Clarks
To Habila Helon
A measure of time past
I am part of your dark side
To this wayward side of this wet Benue roads, children had learnt to be naked leaving their thoughts hang in the air,
Famished.
Cattle and herdmen
Death and people
The watermarks upon our woes.
Before the moon belched
And the wind sneezed loudly
After the sun unmasked the empty roads
The wetness of those roads split our innocence journeying from Enugu to kogi, and cattle, the roads companions;
retracing images of forgotten land.
Wounded dust groans
Grasses quake in communal voices
Journey testes like a sour chicken,
Like a village defeated by war,
Like a burning passion of hatred.
Those wet roads are the cause of our hunger Games and no politicians seen crying as the children are dying!
Forgetting the food basket of the land
Is forgetting our tomorrow in the hands of hunger!
Yours poetically,
©John Chizoba Vincent.
We never saw it coming
but it came
like the sound of the trumpet
heralding the doomsday-
that day, dark as the night
bereft of moon and stars,
that announced your departure.
You were a priest
that santa-claused without ceasing,
brightening every cloudy sky
you met with the sun.
Though separated are we
by the great river
you've crossed ahead of us,
we hope to meet you someday,
not on our side side of the river
in the world of wicked ones
radiating rotten rays
where Ahab robs Naboth
of his vineyard;
but on your side of the river
in the world of saints
united as a congregation
without a segregation,
filled with faces smiling,
free of faces frowning.
N.B. this poem is a tribute to late Father Barnabas Salawu
known to have devoted his life to caring for the poor. His last priestly
assignment was at Magongo,Kogi state, Nigeria before his death in
2011. R.I.P.
This is Ogori-Magongo,
a land of many hills
towering high
above houses and
farmlands
scattered about
like cowries cast
on a diviner's tray.
Ogori-Magongo,the land
where gunshots herald
moments of merriment
with well-wishers
dinning till tummies
threaten to burst,
and wining
till senses go to sleep.
Ogori-Magongo,
a stream from where
emerge
many intellectual hippos
whose steps quake the
earth.
N.B. Ogori-Magongo is a
community in Kogi state of
Nigeria.
A few will be handed over
For millions washed dirt poor,
Dirt brown, stained like urban
Jungles in Detroit, Memphis,
And New Orleans.
An Xbox is my ex-wife,
Frivolous and expensive.
Some folks are too thick to set eyes on;
Men are proudly called sons –
Lads with fettered brains –
Telling again our story –
Reminiscent of Ebu, Edo, and Kogi
Wearing iron bangles
And anklets. I found one
By an old stone building.
I used to savor the “fact”
That the walls were broken down.
A Playstation is like a train station;
We wait for them to take us back.
If I try to alter our short-comings
We will echo what we’ve heard
A thousand times: “But …”
What about them, they too are engrossed?
Some must be sacrificed; few are …
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