Poet-Today ~ Atoyebi Oluwafemi Akin ~ The Arts-Muse Fair

Pic: Aminu S Muhammad

...A Dance at Naira-Night...

All I see are the miscalculated feet

In processional mourning of the eerie beats from a native drum

The hands of the elders are masterpieces

Full of the rhythmic sounds that play at the tomb

Of the village youths.

II

Let it not be put under the tongues of the cowards

The elders of our age had traded the cult of decency for a youthful lust.

Beyond this gloom of loss,

I will announce the reign of reasoning

to halt the culture of hypocrisy

Beyond this tirade of anguish,

I will declare the revolution of thought

Towards a regeneration of clannish love

Beyond this era of dirge,

May these gods miss their path to alter the fate of our promising 'morrow.

A Watch Upon the Night's Stars

And when the virtuous grin

transmuted to a sham

is greeted with a loud ecstasy

By my puerile clans,

I took a chance,

towards the dawn of our nights,

to stride

along the confluence point at Niger.

Though I had no cause

to steal a gaze on the imprint

of the celestial bodies on the flirtatious surface of the water body

but my sight proved upon me

an insightful drive

than the straying feet

for I was encountered with

a memory so large;

Of the wounded voices

of the downtrodden

hushed by streams of wickedness flowing from the spring of Niger;

I saw,

the groaning on the face of Benue

Covered with the mask of smile,

Carved by the heavy hand of terror;

I gained a knowledge

Of how our grains of hope

Is washed down

Into the body of ocean

By the erosion powered

By the reign of thunders

Through the help of our smoke...

*****

Atoyebi Oluwafemi Akin

Atoyebi7@yahoo.com; 07033748882

Center for Performing Arts and Film studies in Education Osogbo