The Soyinka Decad: Lexical Sonnets
The Ogunian Architect
Ogun, the circumambient smith of bifurcated paths,
Inaugurates the threnody with iron’s jagged breath,
Where Wole, scion of the forge, defies the tyrant's wraths,
And wreathes the grey-haired brow against the chill of death.
The Aké mists dissolve in Leeds’ cold, analytic light,
Yet home-bound spirits pulse beneath the skin of alien tropes,
He fashions dramas from the void of the transition's night,
And anchors in the forest’s depth his metamorphic hopes.
No hollow mimicry of Whitehall’s sterile, bloodless prose,
But guttural resonance of ritual’s dark, somatic weight,
The Interpreters arise where the stagnant river flows,
To dissect the putrescence of a nascent, fractured state.
The lion’s mane is silvered now by the harmattan's haze,
A sentinel of conscience in these anomic days.
The Cryptic Shuttle
In the interstitial silences of solitary walls,
Where the man died in those who kept their craven silence still,
The poet’s stylus carves the dark where the shadow falls,
And binds the shuttle's motion to an iron, indomitable will.
The crypt becomes a crucible, the silence a sharp tongue,
Mandela’s earth and Idanre’s peak converge in one fierce cry,
Against the military jackboot where the Abiku is hung,
Between the prison floor and the unreachable, sapphire sky.
Lexical clusters bloom from the rot of political jail,
A maximalist threnody for the horseman’s final ride,
He will not let the open sore of a continent pale,
Nor let the happiest people in their hollowed pride abide.
His pen is the sword of Ogun, tempered in the sun,
A Nobel-crowned odyssey that has only just begun.
We LL go on generating batches of these sonnets, with focus on a specific period of his life, such as his time at the University of Leeds or his exile during the Abacha regime
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