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June 12 and its children – Part 2

By Niyi Osundare
24 June 2018   |   3:19 am
Continued from last week. THE TORTOISE’S SECOND COMING? Flying turtles, midnight noons Strange like a seven-headed penis... People of our land, Have you heard the news? Remember the gap-toothed Prince of Tricks Grand Annuller, Proscriber of Prophets Make way for his second coming He who dribbled the country into dross Granted Graft a cabinet post…

Photo credit: ABC

Continued from last week.

THE TORTOISE’S SECOND COMING?

Flying turtles, midnight noons
Strange like a seven-headed penis…

People of our land,
Have you heard the news?

Remember the gap-toothed Prince of Tricks
Grand Annuller, Proscriber of Prophets

Make way for his second coming

He who dribbled the country into dross
Granted Graft a cabinet post

Make way for his second coming

Who killed our Hope
Abolished our Laughter

Make way for his second coming

His trumpet-blowers are filling the streets
His mouth-pieces are threatening like crocodile jaws

Make way for his second coming

His dispatch-riders are trampling our grass
His moneybags are rolling in the dust

Make way for his second coming

His flags are flailing
His anthem is supreme anathema

Make way for his second coming

His thunder is renting our sky
His storm is wracking our roofs

Make way for his second coming

He flayed us with whips the first time
He will skin us with scorpions the second time

Make way for his second coming

Tail-less we are, tribe of amnesic toads
Dry like a dinosaur’s scars, headless like crabs

Make way for his second coming

The rain which beat us many seasons ago
Will drench us to death in a second deluge

Make way for his second coming

He who killed the country in his first gallop
Is coming, horse-high, for the funereal finish

Make way for his second coming

All hail the gap-toothed Tortoise
Mess-iah Monarch in a jungle of fools

Make way for his second coming

IV

THE FORTUNATE INHERITOR

Widows wail, orphans lament
The people cry from their lowly roosts

Another Emperor swaggers in appropriated power
From inside the rock, the same old rock

Beneficiary of votes cast and votes un-cast
Fortunate inheritor whose legator’s name

Now burns his lips like a dreadful spell
(He says he was busy tending his farm

When they offered him the golden crown;

But unlike good old Cincinnatus, what kind

Of Re-public will this one bequeath?)

His own second term, too, and multiple terms

In his first coming he wielded an open sword

This time the sword hides under a flowing robe

Talking, never listening, hectoring hardly heeding,

All-knowing, all-mighty, an oracle beyond restraint

Like the tortoise in the tale, he will climb the palm tree

With the gourd of wisdom tied to his chest

Widows wail, orphans lament

The people cry from their lowly roosts

His is the era of want and worry

Of lean shadows and swindled dreams

Gari is untouchable in the market

A grain of rice costs a handsome fortune

Rent-gatherers fill the streets with homeless hordes

Hired killers hit at ten corpses for twenty kobo

The Naira melts

Like wax in a tropical furnace

Dark days, dark nights,

Roads spot potholes like thirsty craters

The land rots and reeks like a NEPA-less morgue

But it’s all power and perfume to the imperial nose

Chronically hard of seeing

The Emperor romps around in majestic indifference

His ward bursting with designer robes

His mocking foppery an affront to the people’s rags

Widows wail, orphans lament

The people cry from their lowly roosts

Trounce- trance-parency Incorporated

Deadly deeds dark as night

The land drowns in dire decay
The Emperor assays a placebo of platitudes

Clever Chichidodo, our Emperor hates shit & all its stench
He only feeds on the maggots from that forbidden mound

Co-, co-rupture, co-rupt, CO-RRUPTION
When the Emperor met that foe in the battlfield

He trembled, then executed a four-star retreat
Sacred cows have grazed the land into baldness:

Can a soiled finger really clean up its sullied mates?
The Caucus Leader is magician by day, marauder by night

He and Dirt call each other by the first name
Famous Factotum, he can fix a fart!

Ashes. Ashes. Grey intimations of foregone fires
Where are the hearths which endured their heat?

Behold these motley feathers
Where are the nests bereft by their plunder?

Widows wail, orphans lament
The people cry from their lowly roost

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