An Ode To Soyinkaresque.part 37

To reach the requested magnitude of five hundred sonnets while sustaining a dense lexical maximalism, the cycle now pivots toward the theogony of his dramatic works and the anthropological density of his memoirs. These verses encapsulate the Kongian essence—an intellectual velocity that refuses to decelerate.

Upon the crenellated heights of rock and mist,

The Ogunquit traveler scales the jagged spine,

Where chthonic vapors and the stars have kissed

The hematite of a sacrificial shrine.

He parses the geology of the soul,

A stratigraphic depth of myth and bone,

To make the shattered porcelain nation whole

Through the maximalist power of the word alone.

The Idanre clouds are pregnant with the roar

Of primordial iron striking against the sky,

A metaphysical surge from shore to shore

Where the Abiku dreams and the tyrants die.

He maps the topography of human pain

In the cadence of the falling, cleansing rain.

XI. The Interpreters’ Labyrinth

They wander through the swamps of Lagos night,

The Interpreters of a fractured, dawning age,

Seeking a specular and holy light

Beyond the circumference of the gilded cage.

With lexical density, he weaves their path,

A polyphonic tapestry of doubt and fire,

Escaping the monolithic aftermath

Of the colonial and the venal sire.

Each character a synecdoche of grace,

A metaphoric limb of the greater whole,

Searching for the primordial face

Of the decolonized and sovereign soul.

The syntax twists like mangrove roots in mud,

Pulse-beats of intellect and African blood.

XII. The Ake Orchards of Memory

The pomology of childhood sweet and tart,

In the shadow of the parsonage and the hill,

Where the nascent beat of the poet’s heart

First learned the rhetoric of the iron will.

He gathers the fallen fruit of history’s tree,

The aroma of incense and the wood-smoke’s haze,

To build a monument of memory

Through the labyrinthine and golden days.

From wild Christian zeal to the ancient rite,

The syncretic fusion of the mind began,

To forge a maximalist and inner light

In the embryonic and the coming man.

The Ake hills remain the umbilical ground

Where the universal voice was finally found.

XIII. The Madmen and Specialists

In the asylum of the state, the doctors dance,

A cacophony of power and dark deceit,

Where logic is a victim of a cruel mischance

And humanity lies trampled in the street.

He uses satire as a scalpel’s blade,

To cut the gangrene from the body’s core,

Exposing the machinations of the trade

In the theatre of the eternal, bloody war.

The mendicants chant a liturgy of woe,

A glossolalia of the starved and blind,

While the specialists reap what they did sow

In the panopticon of the modern mind.

His lexis is a shield against the rot,

The incandescent truth that time forgot.