By Tony Afejuku

The gleaner-glimpser-glitterer wishes to open this column which he is giving his consciousness to on Easter Sunday by openly acknowledging the omniscience of his own moods – whose consciousness is not restricted consciousness. The moods travel everywhere. They sail and sail and roam and roam in the gleaner-glimpser-glitterer’s determination to get the key of your country my country our country’s mystery. Why is Nigeria not the Nigeria of our dream? Why has Nigeria not been the Nigeria of our dream? Why has Nigeria not been the Nigeria of our dream since merciless time? Why have our heads of state not been the heads of state of our dream? Why have our presidents not been the presidents of our dream?

And I remember my essay entitled “We must keep marching on” of Friday, March 15, 2024 published here. It was on the occasion of Ramadan Mubarak. Then, among other things, I yearned for “A new dawn of brightness and more brightness and of more brightness…” Pointedly, the glitterer-glitteringly inked these questions: “But can President Bola Tinubu and his genuine philosophers light this bright morning lantern for us?” Indeed, “Can the President surprise us with a new cry of joy? Can he kill our present inglorious present and time – and re-born a new Nigerian life of giving birth designed for our patriotic pleasure?” The glitterer is still glitteringly asking the same questions this Easter season of passionate enchantments.

Numerous things enchant the glitterer’s moving moods, ever moving and roaming, ever roaming and moving to yesterday and beyond yesterday to poems he inked ages ago – five of which he now tenders now. The poems are still alive as they were alive then in the early nineteen seventies, 1980s and 1990s. These poems of my early, middle, and late youth were retrieved from various places, anthologies and journals, including Chinua Achebe’s Okike: An African Journal of New Writing, and published in the glitterer’s collection A Garden of Moods in 1996. The poems, among others, to re-state his idea, span his early, middle and late youthful years of soaring, Shelleyan restlessness. Today’s sad situation recalls yesterday’s and beyond yesterday’s sad situations. The gleaner-glimpser-glitterer is glad that those who are alive to see and know the poems are alive to see and know them now.

The Poet’s Mind
The poet’s mind
Is a garden of moods
Where there are no weeds
Where every plant is in flower
Where every plant ripens.

The poet’s mind
Is a garden of moods and memories
Where ideas are ever in flower
Where there are no wedges,
But where also abominations are hatched….
Who disputes it?
When a cock hatches eggs
It is an abomination
When a hen crows
It is an abomination….

The poet’s mind
Is a garden of moods and abominations
Which roams everywhere for a vision,
Mankind’s rarest gift,
Which shapes our world and well-being.

Who disputes it?
The Gargoyle
No spouting water
Seen
Instead mass impure
Liquid
Strange to nature,
Even to science-made
Man,
Comes gushing out of
The Gargoyle –
Mass liquidation of
Peace,
Justice,
Honour
Morale,
Goodness and happiness.
Existing in the land are
Suffering,
Perjury,
Unheroic heroism
Making a pack
Among the science-made
Men wonder,
Those who’ve reached
The far end of the existing current,
But coming back is a great difficulty.
At the same time the
Oppressed,
The true sons of nature,
Are coming round
With their own gargoyle
And vindicated they will be.
May 1989
How dark the clouds are
A change setting the sun….

Men wicked, mad and drunk
With power sink in ruins of tyrannical fame –
Men who at first carried the people
With progressive dreams,
Men of hollow fame and low senses –
Vile fellows hoisted up
On deck and heaped with honours and privileges.

The country stinks of squalid poverty
And in many abodes, mothers and their children
Eat accursed meals
Amidst a few of their kindred
Who in mornings as they rise rinse
Their mouths in sumptuous wealth!
In towns vultures alight on roof-tops
Waiting for mat-coffins
And in some bush somewhere
Maggots feast on men’s entrails,
Buzzards perch on their eyes and skulls.
From their affluence-deck our vile fellows
Command green berets to ventilate with
Bullets citizens who itch
To cast them down with ripe protests.

Alas! They name you Death –
Benin, Lagos, Ibadan, Okigwe,
Homes of corpses in the grass.

Land Song
We own this land
And the swamps
The palms
And the mangroves;
We’ll die defending them.

The judges may have their pockets swelled
And the courts wring the neck of justice
We own this land
The soil is ours
And the palms
The mangroves
And the swamps;
We’ll die in their defence.

Our shark brothers may sneak around
And soften official palms
We own this land
The raped land will be chastened and restored
And the mangroves
The palms
And the swamps;
We’ll live for them.

Evening Prayer
The leeches suck and drain the land;
At will they feast and sup, and
Anyone who talks is made a gaol-bird
And there in gaol he pines and pines away,
A living dead awaiting shroud.

O God, with the setting of the sun
Send us kites from the blues:
When the morning wakens
Then may new Nigerians arise
Pure and fresh and strong and guiltless
In your holy eyes to march into the future full
of hopes,
Hopes that will inspire them to cleanse the
land:
Stir them (our able men)
To roar the lion’s roar,
And to emit missiles
That will sink our generation’s hollowmen:
Mis-rulers, oppressors, gluttons:
When they fall,
We will dump their bodies in a worm-hole
And let maggots gaze and edge by;
Flies will buzz and fly by,
Vultures hover and wing by;
Gluttons are carrions, carrions gluttons.

We will chasten our land,
Our sins wipe away:
Firm purpose,
Whilst all ages run….

The glitterer’s consciousness addresses his abominable garden and yours and yours and yours: Then and now are not different.

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.