Aje Olokun and Other Poems

By Mayokun Kehinde Folorunsho

Aje Olokun

Aje Olokun
My hands are cupped
In the ocean of supplication
As I forage
In this classified world
Where
The rich keep having
The poor keep lacking
And all eyes know no sleep

Aje Olokun
My hands are cupped
In the ocean of supplication
Owolabi's soles have melted
On his way to find a seat
Under air condition
Monday, they say, is your day
How many have hurried into danfo
And returned in a fleet of ambulance

Aje Olokun
The hoe that tilled the earth
Later dug the farmer's grave
Market women wear a grin
Yet their intestines are grumbling
How many who know not their way home
Have been shot like a stone
From the catapult of labour
But return to manure treeing saps

Aje Olokun
My hands are cupped
In the ocean of supplication
If you earth in the earth
If you earth in the deep
If you earth in the forest
Wherever you please
True, the pulchritude of life
Is to have an unequal pair
But, Aje Olokun
When you have roamed and roamed
When you leave gold-forged gates
Do not forget
My doddering doo

I Am Going Home

I am going home
Once again to kiss
The feet of my ancestors
Where I left them ere I came
On this journey through the woods

Many have come and gone
Some as reckless prodigals
Who lost their maps
To the crucifix and crescent moon
That claim you are stained with a magical blood

On this journey I have learnt
When to cry and how to laugh
When to laugh and how to cry 
Bemoaning my fate behind an English beam
As winter bellows afar

And having nothing more to share
With the chameleon of my nativity
"Back to roots", the wind whispers
Well, not as an empty Peter
For my boat is filled with golden fishes

Summer Eyes

Summer eyes
Do rain salty drops of loss
When silver turns rust
And does not again shelter
A naked soul

We can only hear 
A blue tempo
Making lyrics with our verses
Wreathed into dreams
Of that searing loss

But let us not drown and drown
In that pool
For to unearth a Reason
Must we taste that rust
And wear our souvenirs with glee

Embittered Voice

I weep in joy 
For heaven's gate is shut
As I tread on bare soles
This path of thorns and pins and nails
On a pilgrimage through the forest

I have heard some say
The Jerusalem is here
Others envision Christ's labour
But which is not the desire
Of these sore-furrowed feet
That have seen capless heads and headless caps?

So, born with an earthen spoon
I kneel in abject helplessness
Before my Playwright
For time ticks away my script
And being the mason of my destiny
I cry in an embittered voice:
Will I cross the border
With no footprints behind?

Saviour

We starve for a saviour
in our scarlet country
having offered ransoms
of skeletons of khaki
and Chibok's cargoes
millions of peasant cadavers
a token of supplicant tongues
those tints on our old-glory
from the calvary of puzzling slaughters
in grisly gluttony
of, probably, purple appetites

And since we only leashed
that history to time
we can only wish
for a saviour who has heard
these vociferations
from his mother's womb
and will not sup with them
from the cup of torments
those human gules
drained as tinctures
for ancient wounds
that stream our wasteland

We starve for a saviour
in our scarlet country

Ode to Freedom

Let the story be
Told in letters fine as dust
That crush into patters
And flood into a rivulet of sores
Where truth becomes roasted yam
Sauced and spiced with honest blood

Let the story be
Exhumed with patriotic sweat
From the tumulus of freedom
Where their silence keeps reaching us
Where communal silos exist underground
And hunger becomes a plague

Let the story be
As naked Adam
In the garden of shrinking bones
Nourished with poverty
Where naira becomes a droplet
To fill our sapless tank

Let the story be
Rescued from the slaughterhouse
To nagging mouths
How these years have shrivelled like a sapling
In the drought since nineteen sixty