Long Griots Poems

(Apropos of Black Poetic Griots)

We may not be deemed apostolic recorders
But we poets, guided with divine wisdom, are
The lay scribes thereof in the chronicling of
Our life’s sojourn in the shadowing times
we spend here on this...

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EULOGY TO MRS (Ph.D) ALIHAJA, AMINAT OLABOOPO                            ...

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The golden silence melts away, and joy un-named
From the phantom pipes exults me
For no silence can so rhapsodized and doubts tamed
That man deserves better glory.
And what if sin could, levelling us, permit this to remain
Tell...

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Africa is raped. The continent of life is pumped dry, and the colonizer won’t stop, ’till he is stopped. And blocked.

We pay colonial tax for the baskets we have weaved. Our own weaved baskets. We...

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We, are your friends
We spend each and every day with you including the weekends
Become your griots in the night, singing close to your eardrums
Our race love to dance, but you pretend to clap at us...

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Smile if I could
smile if I would
smile as I should…
I can see 
ancestors smiling
down on you and me…
They’re singing
for us to lean
on them when 
we feel weak
for they are 
with us
like living beings
giving what we...

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COME, LETS BEAT THE ANCESTRAL DRUM

Sitting here flowing
through the meters of time
like a smooth spring stream
meandering through forest greens,
I peruse the many folds
of the caverns of this fluid mind of mine;
searching for words that would...

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Never forsake the lineage in which we
originated from because
the ancestors are watching us
Their eyes are on the sparrow
anticipating us to soar into
our excellence 
Wash ourselves in their royalty
while remembering they were 
kings and queens long...

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The New Griots—Pouring Down Raining Words
From the wombs
of our pregnant minds
may our charged words
drop like God’s tears
reaching the depths
of the precincts 
 of your souls
seeping like His raindrops
to swollen  roots
anchoring life anew
birthing thunderstorms
of revelations
missed...

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Let us write from dusk till dawn our grief upon a page
Let us cry for young loves gone like birds from a cage
We who are the social conscience of the world, a wage
Still due must...

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Don’t be like that elephant that caused the infants
to slaughter one another indifferent to its posterity
he lifted the corrupt dropped the ripe and bullied 
the resolute warrior 

don’t be like the idiot hunter who kept...

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Mama Africa, 
Land of my ancestors' birth;
Source of all mankind, 
the once Shangri la of mother earth.

Stir up the spirit of the Mau-Mau in vibrato on the bongo.
Your ways are far higher than the crags...

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ah! ’tis blue azure greet’ng the dark maidens
dancers of the ancient drums of my warriors
yea! the ever-ready danc’ng mbari maidens
o, dancers amid the smooth-throat’d hunters –

’tis like an ever-flow’ng rhythmic drumm’ng
of my ageless clan where...

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Poets That We Are…

Poets are umbilical cords—
chosen links of the pregnant mind
and its births—amniotic guardians
of the poetic descendent.

As mere servants of the word,
we cannot be more of an apostle
than that of: Humble.
Let us who write,...

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Neda is dead
Did anyone weep for Neda
Were all poets dumb
Or just blind to disbelief
Are we not griots
Pens of fire
Makers and drinkers of desire
What did we make when Neda expired?

One word from us
One twittered solitary word
Would...

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Who Are WE but Who We Are…

We are the conscience of the heart;
custodians of its emotions—conjuring,
molding and etching its most sacred feelings
upon the canvas of time’s time;

We are devoted lexical midwives—
delivering depolarized doses
of liberated thoughts...

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Loneliness brings tears...
				Togetherness brings tears too:
				Despair can't bring joy...

With needles of pain
I crocheted emotions
into a web of depression
cocooning myself in defeat

Churning thoughts
shot a stone of memory
from the deepest cavern
of suppression echoing
the echo of an ancestral
Griots’...

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I heard, foremost; that you were grave,
then heard that you were excellent.

For by some ‘men’ you turned a slave,
who served them everywhere they went.

That you were grave: without remorse.
The foremost griots said loud and trite.
That...

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