ktravula – a travelogue!

reflections on the world

Like Mubarak, Like Gbagbo, Like Mugabe

Tyrants stamp brash feet on winding paths on of wide open lands

and laugh on fart cushions in cabinet meetings of fellow fawning hands.

They mouth verbs at protest noises from the warm comforts of palace bedrooms

on one hand a full plate, and on the other soft triggers of their imported dooms.

Tyrants dance around dials of outside help, counting losses like currency notes,

swapping allies like the last statuettes of their long tortuous days and rotes.

They sing lullabies of aftermaths, of threats and tears, against a glory so long lost

and o, they fear. They dream of dreary wings across the windowpanes of frost.

Tyrants languish on the frail chairs of their vain vacuousness. They stink.

They drawl in the slime of impotence, a dour fire of an eighty year old wrink.

I look through the fog of emptiness, and see dead multiples of power tenths

and all that remains of a gentle tug into bright new days of different strengths.

Tryants live so that they may leave, gracelessly, in a baggage of seasoned trash.

No other way remains but will, bold and strong, and despots’ dicks ash to ash.

(c) Kola Tubosun

PS: Feel free to share with friends and acquaintances who share a distaste and spite for despots.

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Like Mubarak, Like Gbagbo, Like Mugabe was published on January 30th, 2011, with the tags , , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently 9 comments on this article so far.

Stoning the Devil

for Jos, for Arizona, for Sudan, for Pakistan, for Cote D’Ivoire, for Tunisia…


A million march of contrite feet
Have trudged on these bright hallowed grounds
While rams of hate graze along in God’s own fields.
Heavy paces in annual contrition
Have trekked like peasant armies on a sea of evil heads,

On thousand squelching grains of stone
As small rocks of war.
Thousand heads have rolled in this dust
In mounds against target gods…

“We are stoning the Devil”
We are always stoning the devil.

Eternal zest with religious strength
Have pelted the Significant with harsh pellets
And a stone will to fiery extinction, yearly,
At varying levels of human will…
“Gbosa!”

Rocks have darted across in wilful spread
on evil personified ahead of the surging crowd.
Hate yet thrives in unnumbered axes
In rains and moulds,on hills and western skies.

So cast the first stone then
When evil remains in hearts across the open earth?
Cast a stone as hate grips like a fiery noose
Around a strained neck of drunken love?

Cast the first stone.

On a crooked way to light
Always lies this crude, black rock.

_________________________

Culled from Headfirst into the Meddle where it first appeared.

(c) Kola Tubosun. Written in May 2003.

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Stoning the Devil was published on January 12th, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Art category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

Looking Forward

To October 1st, 2010

Clapping on the green hill with one withering hand, a loner
dances in the dust with trumpets blarring around his head.
A cake on the side, and black drying welts half a century old
around his back, he swirls with the new colours of the wind.

It’s dawning around a river of sweat, and a cool breeze blows.
The earth is wet with shining slivers of light, and tongues,
and mixed memories of glee, and a past of bilious giggles,
and smiles, and fond thoughts of what might have been.

But the bright day returns, as slowly as it must, within beats
of a thousand heart drums on a global stage. An orchestra
of sounds that must heal or yet renew the promises of dawn.
An old baton into new hands of hope within hope. A gamble.

For here is another gathering of tribes and a dance to promises.

(c) 2010 ktravula.com

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Looking Forward was published on September 30th, 2010, with the tags , , , , under the Art, Opinion category. There are currently 6 comments on this article so far.

Be Like the Road*

Be like the road itself, a long slithering tar in the sun.
Burn the midnight ointment in the wick end of questings.
Climb and soothe, blaze the earth into caverns of seething sights,
And fade with night like a receding haze at the founts of reason.
Be like the road. Bend on carcasses of mangled resistances.
Shoot through the valleys of dearth, and patiently find.
Glide in the fresh breath of daybreak on rock hills and caves,
And dance with dusk amidst forests pregnant with missive gems.
Dare along the courses of delights across a far unending street.
Be like the road itself, eternally trudging like light restless feet.
..
(c)KTravula.com| July 2010
* Title taken from Wole Soyinka’s play The Road.
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Be Like the Road* was published on July 31st, 2010, with the tags , , under the Art, Fun category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Notes on Obscurity

by Benson Eluma
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1.
Sister Mustard died someplace
Mount Ebola, I think, in Africa.
They planted a mine on the headstone
For a curious little boy to play with.
Kaboom! and his lost limbs made
A weeklong presence on international news.
Sister Mustard turned
And smiled in her death…
.
2.
The ants worked hard in the sun
Following the ancient wisdom.
But this year the rains did not fall; they waxed
Lyrical, Hard Rock melting sand-home and barn.
Afterwards, camera crews rushed
To scoop water; their
Precision instruments detailing
The wreckage to the last microscopic fractal…
.
3.
The poetaster wrote his dying song
After so many years of ruing the ignominy
Of his verse, the evil recalcitrance of his stylus.
He sent it out, a warning to others trying the impossible.
But the critics, hard up for new conundrums,
Overturned every stone;
They scoured every cave
To lay laurels at his unmarked grave…
.
4.
And Daodu, born on the first day
In the Year of Jubilee, a complete set of teeth
Fortifying his infant gums,
Died a plenipotentiary with 300 monuments.
And the worms went to work on the annals.
And floods ravaged the city year after year.
And finally a generation arose in whose memory
Daodu’s name, undecipherable, was a dead talisman…
.
Used by permission.
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Notes on Obscurity was published on May 1st, 2010, with the tags , , under the Art, Fun, Opinion category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

-WB Yeats

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The Lake Isle of Innisfree was published on April 17th, 2010, with the tags , , under the Art, Fun category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

Nostalgia – A Not So Old Poem

Do men really feel or just believe? In wandering afterthoughts from your sonic alter-ego,
Love, my belly tickles to a distant bell in childhood paces around our childish lusts.
See me there on the streets of dustland, with heels on the playground of luckless rants.
.
Am I supposed to feel this way again, muse? Your voice spins me to a thousand memories.
I do not stir, nor do the droplets in my eye move beyond their range of steam. No. Muse,
I do not control this softness that drives me across a beaten path towards your taken arms.
.
It is the voice of the night, or else a green-eyed beacon that pushes these fingers to work, and
To stalk: “Traveller, your love has not always been without the crawl of blunt senseless drive.”
It is the delirious dope of distance then, or caprice, or a flighty strong wind of love’s nostalgia.
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Nostalgia – A Not So Old Poem was published on February 26th, 2010, with the tags , , , under the Art, Fun, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Two Poems for Wenger

I wrote this poem last January for Susanne Wenger when news broke that she had passed, and sent it to a couple of friends and a few listservs. Friend Benson Eluma was one of the people who wrote a response in poetry to my offering back then. Click here to read his poem, now published in Nigeria’s NEXT newspaper. The poetic meeting of Benson and I on the campus of the Ibadan University is a long story for another day.

Here below is the final version of what I wrote back then, thanks to a few suggestions from Lola Shoneyin.

Like Chalk in the River

For Susanne, Olorisha!

They said it rained when Suzanne was buried.
It poured.
They spoke of a rumble of the heavens
as the Orisha Osun swam back, again, to her pristine source.

They talked of art.
They spoke of beauty.
They mentioned hands
That sculpted spirits.

But now when the forests have stopped dancing with the rain,
See the wind escape from that storied grove.
Look, amid the hallowed haze,
at a turning twirl of her spirit gaze.

Gone is the eye that looked out for the standing stems
When greed called for arms, and men scorned sense, and all she wove.

Today, the Spirit it was that left, again,
To return. To return: a time-bound god, or else a travelling dove.

NOTE: Susanne Wenger was the Austrian artist who lived most of her life in Osogbo Nigeria as a priestess of the river Osun. Born in Austria, she met and married the German artist Professor Ulli Beier who brought her to Nigeria in the 1949. The couple quickly assimilated in Nigeria, he as a teacher and she as an artist, but they moved from Ibadan to the nearby town of Ede in 1950 to escape what Wenger called the “artificial university compound”. In Ede, she met one of the last priests of the rapidly disappearing, ancestral-based Olorisha religion. She quickly became engrossed in his life and rituals, even though at that time she spoke no Yoruba. “Our only intercourse was the language of the trees,” she said later.

Her work in Osogbo for the many parts of her life included an enormous effort to protect the sacred grove of Osun, a forest along the banks of the Oshun river just outside Osogbo, which she turned into a sculpture garden filled with art made by her and others. The sacred groves of Osun are now UNESCO World Heritage Sites thanks in most part to her efforts. (Read more about her life here).

She died last January in Osogbo, her adopted home, at the age of 92.

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Two Poems for Wenger was published on January 23rd, 2010, with the tags , , , , , under the Art, News, Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

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