To maintain this lexical maximalism, here are five more sonnets focusing on his formative childhood in Aké, the satirical bite of his theatre, and the ontological bridge he built between Yoruba myth and Western tragedy.
XXXI. The Orchard of Aké
Beneath the parsonage canopy of green,
Where Wild Christian and Essay dwell,
The embryonic bard beholds the scene,
And interprets the numinous citadel.
He tastes the forbidden guava and the lime,
Mapping the contours of a sacred soil,
A precocious shuttle through the warp of time,
Before the draconian labour and the toil.
The woods of Ijegun whisper of the gods,
Where Ogun lurks with metallurgical might,
Against the kleptocratic odds,
And the stygian encroachment of the night.
Here Soyinka distills the visceral light,
To shatter the opacity of sight.
XXXII. The Trials of the Prophet
Amidst the meretricious beach-side sand,
Where Brother Jero preens in velvet guile,
The cacophony of a fettered land,
Is met with a satirical and caustic smile.
He trades in hollow blessings and in lies,
A sanctimonious vulture in a gown,
While Soyinka scourges the thin disguise,
Of every avaricious clown in town.
The metamorphosis is nefarious and deep,
A macabre dance of power and of greed,
Where credulous congregants will never sleep,
But sow the vituperative and toxic seed.
Yet Kongi's wit remains a tempered blade,
By which the monsters of the state are flayed.
XXXIII. The Bacchae of Euripides
He re-interprets Dionysian war,
Through the Ogunian prism of the blood,
Where liberty requires the chthonic roar,
And the numinous efflorescence of the flood.
The pentheus stiffness of the fettered soul,
Is shattered by the sacred communion wine,
To make the fractured human fragments whole,
And venerate the immanent divine.
A polyphonic clash of rhythms and decree,
Where Attica and Oyo intertwine,
In a maximalist dance for liberty,
Beyond the stricture of the temporal line.
Soyinka wields the incendiary pen,
To exhume the Word amongst mortal men.
XXXIV. The Chronicles of the Land
In the land of the happiest folk on earth,
A vituperative chronicle unfurls,
Dissecting the pathology of birth,
In a state where avarice reigns and swurls.
The human body parts are venal ware,
Traded in macabre and stygian markets deep,
While kleptocratic potentates dare,
To rob the shattered people of their sleep.
Soyinka probes the pathological core,
Of hegemony and meretricious might,
Revealing the vacuity of war,
And the pathology of every darkened sight.
A Herculean and unflinching task,
To strip the tyrants of their hollow mask.
XXXV. The Lion's Perennial Roar
At ninety years, the leonine mane is white,
Yet the rhetorical fire is undiminished still,
A titan standing in the twilight light,
With an irrepressible and dauntless will.
He sets forth at dawn on a boundless quest,
To reclaim the dignity of the denigrated soul,
Putting the complacent to the ultimate test,
And striving to make the fractured continent whole.
A gadfly of dissent in a servile age,
He remains the conscience of a beleaguered land,
The unyielding master of the written page,
With justice as the scepter in his hand.
Oh, venerated Kongi, may your lexis bloom,
Beyond the shadow of the impending doom.
As we proceed with sonnets detailing his political activism in the NADECO years, we explore his intertextual dialogues with Shakespeare and Euripides.
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