Thursday 25 November 2021

Live Burial - Wole Soyinka





Live Burial

Wole Soyinka

 

Sixteen paces
By twenty-three. They hold
Siege against humanity
And Truth
Employing time to drill through to his sanity

Schismatic
Lover of Antigone !
You will? You will unearth
Corpses of yester-
Year? Expose manure of present birth?

Seal him live
In that same necropolis.
May his ghost mistress
Point the classic
Route to Outsiders' Stygian Mysteries.

Bulletin:
He sleeps well, eats
Well. His doctors note
No damage
Our plastic surgeons tend his public image.

Confession
Fiction ? Is truth not essence
Of Art, and fiction Art?

Lest it rust
We kindly borrowed his poetic licence.

Galileo
We hoped he'd prove - age
Or genius may recant - our butchers
Tired of waiting
Ordered; take the scapegoat, drop the sage.

Guara'l The lizard:
Every minute scrapes
A concrete mixer throat.
The cola slime
Flies to blotch the walls in patterned grime

The ghoul:
Flushed from hanging, sniffles
Snuff, to clear his head of
Sins -- the law
Declared -- that morning's gallows load were dead of.

The voyeur:
Times his sly patrol
For the hour upon the throne
I think he thrills
To hear the Muse's constipated groan


Source: https://sites.google.com/site/wolesoyinkapoet/poetry/-civilian-and-soldier

No comments:

Post a Comment