June 12 and its children – Part 2
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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