Writings / Poetry: Wole Soyinka

Alas for lost idylls. Like Levi jeans on youth and age,
The dreams are faded, potholed at joints and even
Milder points of stress. Ghosts are sole inheritors.
Silos fake rotundity – these are kwashi-okor blights
Upon the landscape, depleted at source. Even
The harvest seeds were long devoured. Empty hands
Scrape the millennial soil at planting.

But Chinua, are you grapevine wired? Do you
Tune in, listen? There is old music in the air.
The word is out again, out from the closet.
Renaissance beats are thumbed in government lairs,
In lobbies, caucuses, on promotion posters,
In parliaments. Academe’s close behind. Renaissance
Haunts beer and suya bar, street and rostrum,
Inhaled as tobacco smoke, chewed as kola,
Clerics beatify the word, lawyers invoke it.
Never word more protean, poised to incarnate
In theses, conferences, investments. A historic lure
Romances the Diaspora. Gang-raped, the continent
Turns pregnant with the word – it’s sworn, we shall be
Born again, though we die in the attempt.

But then, our offsprings, Chinua, have they leisure
To play at love? To commune with Source, shaded
By coarse-grain village walls at noon? Crush wild mint
Between their fingers, let the agbayun coat
Their tongues, at war with the bitterness of kola?
Raid the hoards of gods and ancients,
Recite their lineage praise-names, clan histories?
Or have the rigours of survival bred a race
Of naked predators? Is sharing out of fashion?
Community a dirty word, service an obscenity?

Are ours the emerging children of Molucca
Born to burn at six, slaughter at seven,
Rinse their hand in the throat’s death gurgle,
Secure in the arch-priest’s absolution? Attuned
At noon to dissolution of the bond of dawn, deaf
To neighbour cries? Easy reddened are the wafers
Of communion – have we been here before?

Still, here you sit before the travelled world, gathered
To pay homage. Survived the kwashi-okor days.
You’ve fed on roots, barks and leaves
Your world contracted, ringed with iron
Fenced with the wringing hands of the world
As unctuous in neutrality as Pontius Pilate.
But you made flesh what is so often said –
Sweet are the uses of adversity – as even now
Your silent eloquence attests. The ancient pot-stills
Turned refineries. Neglected herbs, mystery silica
Powered transistors to accuse the world, screaming
We are not dead, but dying. And iron monsters
Rose furtively from forest bays, hammered
From the forges of Awka. Who can forget the errant
Ogbunikwe that rose skywards, plunged to blast
A fiery tunnel through encircling steel?

Absences surround your presence – he
The great town crier, Okigbo, and other griots
Silenced in infancy. The xylophones of justice
Chime much louder than the flutes of poets,
Their sirens lure the bravest to their doom.
But some survive, and survival breeds, it seems,
Unending debts. Time is our usurer, but earth remains
Sole signatory to life’s covenant – and thus I ask:
Whose feet are these upon the storehouse loft?
Shod in studded boots or jewelled sandals,
Khaki crisp or silk embroidered – who are these?

Did time appoint these bailiffs? Behold
Enforcers out of time, shorn of memory but –
Crowned are the hollow skulls, signets on talons.
Their advent is the hour of locusts – behold
Cheeks in cornucopia from the silos’ depletion
While the eyes of youth sink deeper in despair.
Death bestrides the streets, rage rides the sun
And hope is a sometime word that generations
Never learnt to spell.

Chinua, I think with you I dare
Be indelicate – we scrape our feet upon
The threshold of mortal proof, denying
The ancestors yet awhile our companionship –
May that day learn patience from afar! –
On the stage at Bard, behind the lectern,
Gazing across time to your staunch spirit
Wedded to a contraption we neither make nor mend
My irreverent thoughts were – There sits the nation,
All faculties intact, but wheelchair bound.
Your lesson of the will, alas, a creative valour
Marks the gulf between you and that land
We claim our own.

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