Songs of Anisha
“Abiola’s Cry,”
by Senator Ihenyen
I know your faces, splashed by the threads of light against the shadowy
walls of death! I know those eyes! Those dark devilish eyes staring at the spirit
of a struggling soul, held behind your bars of brutality! Tortuous tyranny and
poisonous peace!
And do I not know your footsteps?
Those brutal boots that crunch aloud along the corridors of death and terror!
Take my soul! Take my soul!! Feed my flesh to the vultures!
And splash my blood in your
democratic skies to paint the rainbow with the colours of a legacy
you never believed in!
For this spirit shall blaze in your darkened dawn
like the fire of the sun! Rekindled, this voice shall be the cockcrows
Of your voiceless dawn! These tears shall splash on the earth,
washing away the dabs of blood still dribbling in its unstained innocence!
Still struggling! Still hunting you in your sleepless nights!
This heartbeat shall thump again not like the gongs of a dance,
But like thunder in the ears of those who shed crocodile tears
And shoot bullets to the sky in my days of dust!
Listen! Listen to the throb of my blood
For like palm-oil, it washes the land from the cold blood of your democracy
Born by tyranny! Baptised by brutality!
Crucified by truth!
“Crickets,”
by Al-Kasim Abdulkadir
Twittering all day long
All night till morn.
In your cycle of twittering
I wonder what tales or gossips
You bear.
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