VI. The Weaver of the Crypt
Behold the restless bolt of shuttle’s flight,
Through warp and weft of solitary dread,
It threads the shrouded needle of the night,
With fibers from the living and the dead.
A weaverbird in carceral cage confined,
He spins a tapestry of visceral rage,
To guard the sanctum of a sovereign mind,
And etch his defiance on the misted page.
No soporific balm for Kaduna’s cell,
But chimes of silence ringing funereal toll,
He navigates the stygian depths of hell,
To save the shattered fragments of the soul.
From Joseph’s dreams to Ulysses’ peregrine way,
He charts the liminal path to coming day.
VII. The Idanre Deluge
Upon the granite heights of Idanre,
Where Sango and Ogun clash in fulgent war,
The petrichor of primordial desire,
Ascends from the copper earth’s verdant floor.
A wine-girl keeps a vigil on the shattered road,
Where harvest comes in stately, luminous flood,
And myths of old discharge their heavy load,
In rhythms pulsed with numinous, Yoruba blood.
The sun peacocks its iridescent light,
Across the scars of filth and bamboo spears,
As Soyinka claims the sovereign poet’s right,
To transcend the cacophony of fears.
With lexical thunder and metaphoric rain,
He exorcises the phantom of the slain.
VIII. The Tigritude Proclamation
No mendacious boast of tigritude he cries,
For the pouncing beast proclaims no hollow creed,
But in the shadow where the duiker dies,
The skeleton reveals the inner deed.
He scorns the negritude of Senghor’s embrace,
Preferring radical humanism’s gritty light,
To map the contours of a fractured race,
And pounce upon the tyrants in the night.
With satirical bite and ironic guile,
He strips the Area Boy of his vainglorious mask,
And meets the despot’s meretricious smile,
With the gadfly’s relentless, unforgiving task.
His erudition is a tempered blade,
By which the monsters of the state are flayed.
IX. The Interpreter of Chaos
Amidst the interpreters’ effervescent wit,
Where Sagoe explores the void’s cacophonous floor,
And fountains of grief in hypotactic fit,
Reveal the crevices of the Biafran war.
The road is a carnivorous and hungry beast,
Demanding sacrifices of petrol and steel,
Where laymen and prophets share a ghastly feast,
Beneath the crushing weight of Ogun’s wheel.
He weaves the past into a dance of forests wild,
Where ancestors and living grapple for the soul,
And every broken and abiku child,
Must pay the stygian and exacting toll.
A polyphonic voice of erudite decree,
He drafts the lexicon of liberty.
X. The Nonagenarian Sentinel
The grey-haired doyen of Abeokuta’s hills,
Remains a paragon of stalwart dissent,
Against the kleptocratic and draconian wills,
Of those on meretricious power bent.
His chronicles are incendiary and raw,
Dissecting the pathology of greed,
While upholding the unwritten, moral law,
That blossoms from the intellectual seed.
From Stockholm’s halls to Ibadan’s dusty light,
His voice of vision exceeds every confine,
A numinous beacon in the gathering night,
Where justice and erudition intertwine.
Oh, venerated Kongi, may your lexis bloom,
Beyond the shadow of the impending doom.
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