What Can I Call This? - Poems by Kole Ade-Odutola
- By Kole Ade-Odutola
- Published May 21, 2007
- Poems
- Unrated
Kole Ade-Odutola
Now to Kole and a runaway avalanche of contentions. Poet, photographer, environment and culture activist, videographer, communicator, radio show presenter and producer, journalist, writer, man about town, globe trotter?Want me to go on? He recently concluded a Masters Program in Ithaca, NY where he has been awhile. Before that, he was in England. Before that, he was in Germany. Before that?Kole is the author of The Poet Fled and The Poet Bled. He has had papers and poems published in cross-continental journals and anthologies, i.e. For Ken, For Nigeria, Junge Nigerianische Lyrik, etc.
View all Entries by Kole Ade-OdutolaOne without title
I was a proud member of the margins of literature
in the city of Lagos where words written were signatures
for the mean and their meanness.
Do not ask me if I still know the other members,
my answer is that I do not remember their faces
I can only recall the smell of our collective feces
and the odor of stinking reason written with bile.
I still see piles of unpublished efforts and lies
of reviewers who send rejection slips to induce
sleep in budding dreamers.
They who won awards of ANA and from other banal
givers never considered that text riddled with ‘is’ and ‘was’
serious enough for consumption by the lords of letters.
The teachers without students, the critics who dispensed
sadness to struggling scribblers.
I know their number in hell and the reserved palace
in the kingdom of heat.
They all will roast like suya meat
and rolled like local taba by those who smoke.
The writers’ empire is divided down the line
like the faulty class structure in a non-producing nation,
they parade borrowed notions
and take loans of ideas without thought
nothing will stop the rot, as nothing can cure
their madness….
I, a sober member of the margins of literature speak
far from the city of haters where written words
are swords to the heat.
© Kole Ade Odutola
The next president
A reigning King is about to relinquish the throne,
the people are not thrown into mourning
He who comes anew is not morning-fresh
but a leader among national used-parts,
whose coming and going into our nation’s life
leaves our accounts serrated and dripping of red
Dig deeper next time, when rigging carnival is over
We know the real votes into the toilets will go
as ghosts and goats mix with thoughtless voters
and bloated numbers win the race for faceless,
heartless CONtestants…
Does anyone ever face
rusty jail bars for stealing people’s Voices?
Or are we back in the season when learned
friends of the bar make legal gymnastics
With the law?
Cries of anguish must have been hard
for those who bore these burdens all along
The road from freedom so long
Our feet and hearts have wounds inflicted as scars
We know Yar’Adua will not yell at the Aladura
for no just cause either in Jos or after Jumat.
The last king was always right and always ready
to yap any bloody civilian or militician
He was also a singing musician whose
voice blessed children with nightmares
and stones as bread for their parents
A draining King is about to leave
Long live the Ota farmer whose
Oppression fed nations
leaving opponents fleeing the nation
…and the rest so disillusioned
the past periods of pain appear
sweeter than a pregnant future.
© Kole Ade Odutola May 09, 2007
