AFRICA
By Adegboyega Adejuwon
Home of my nativity
Origin of my roots
Hail, mother Africa!!
We whom thy womb bore -
Tender, baked and frail
Suckling at thy breasts ….
Upon your revered sod
Like toddlers, we learnt
From our wobbling early steps
Till weaned to polity
Past dusky annals
When the morrow’s dawned
And the torch’s passed
To light up our minds
Against cerebral forays
And not mere colonialism
But from hearts as dark
As our sunbaked skins
May we freely learn
Devoid of ban and bane
May we truly know
With purity of mind
May we our faiths express
Not ill-fatedly oppressed
May we boldly love
Not nepotistically sunder
May we selflessly share
Free of cowardly avarice
May we fully grow
Past hordes of woes and ills
That needlessly plague
Sheltered may we be
In your feathery wings
From ravenous hawks
Within and without
So seeking to prey
On us as game
May this duty owed
Absent fear or favour
To posterity we discharge
Till bequeathed shall be
An Africa, we dreamt
The Africa that’s prized
Long live Africa!
THE ELEMENTS
By Moshood Azeez
Fire
Golden, hot,
Crackling, stinging, incinerating,
A judgment upon Gomorrah
Burn!
Water
Silvery, cool,
Flowing, gushing, meandering,
A deluge in the days of Noah
Drown!
Air
Unseen, warm
Blowing, felling, howling
Exemplified in the Iliad of Odysseus
Immersive!
Sand
Brown, temperate
Binding, blinding, deepening,
The fate of men, six foot underneath
Mortality!
MORAL DECADENCE
By Moshood Azeez
The sanctions do not have a blast
radius anymore
The disciplines have gone off on a
tangent
The circumference of morals have
been bisected, and
The value of ethics have been
reduced to pi
The daily count of global disobedi-
ence
Now equals the number of Avogadro
Inversely, arithmetically, the count of
morality
Has abridged to a constant of Planck
The acceleration of free fall now
applies
In the values we uphold and the
words we speak
The lens through which we see right
and wrong
Sadly, may have been blackened by
soot
What is to be done, as we have
undoubtedly come so far
Do we compromise in this lane of
uncertainty?
Retrace our steps back to good old
days, if any?
Or maintain the drive down this
dead-end, this cul-de-sac?
Unity in Diversity by Nonso Nduanya (Acrylics).
July - September 2016 •
The Lion King
• 57
POETRY |
ARTS
