ktravula – a travelogue!

“I Can’t Breathe” | New Poem by Níyì Ọ̀ṣúndáre

      (Episodic Variations on the Ripples of a Primal Scream)

            I

I can’t breathe

   I can’t breathe

     I can’t bre

       I can’t

         I can’t

I. . . .

            *

2020: Black Lives Matter

1965: I AM A MAN

            *

There are countless ways

Of lynching without a rope

            *

The casualties were fewer than we ever expected:

     10 Persons

         &

     1,000 Negroes

            *

For every Black in college

There are a hundred more in prison

             *

So many centuries on,

America still has a “Negro Problem”

             *

My skin is my sin,

Sings Bluesman with the wailing strings,

My very life is an “underlying condition”

For countless afflictions

            *

And the Media Sage responds:

Racism is America’s Original Sin

Violence, its inalienable companion

             *

There is a common crime in town:

Breathing While Black (BWB)   

            *

Mr. George Floyd committed two cardinal crimes:

He was Black

He was big

            *

Black Lives Matter

Black Life Martyrs

            *

Asked Louis Armstrong, the Smiling Trumpetman:

What did I do to be so black and blue?

                  II

Black Life Martyrs,

Their voices rise from their untimely graves:

Amadu Diallo, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray,  Botham Jean, Breanna Taylor, Philando Castille, Trayvon Martin, Ahmaud  Arbery,  George Floyd. . . . .

Any Hall of Fame

For Trophies from Police hunts?

            *

To be and not to be

To wallow in want in a sea of wealth

To shout and not be heard

To stand and not be seen

To sow and never to reap

To live all your life below the Law

To be stopped and frisked stopped and frisked stopped and frisked stopped and. . . . . 

To be told countless times

To forgive and then forget

            *

Yess Sur, Yes Maa’m. . . . 

Put them at ease with your Negro smile

Your low, low, bow and your high regard

That cool façade is your saving grace

The “Angry Black Man” is as good as dead

            * 

911, 911,  911, 911

My name is Sue, 

Calling from my car in City Park

There’s a big black male around

Whose big dark shadow is menace to my sight 

Please send a cop; my life is at risk

              *

Choke-hold, choke-hold

Stranglehold and dash and dangle

400 years of knee-on-neck

              *

Our Police know their oath:

To serve

   &

To protect

            *

The Police Chief took a knee

The Sheriff followed in tow 

Is this a genuine genuflection 

To Kaepernick’s treason

Or patronizing bribe of momentary appeasement?

            *

And the Emperor snarls 

From the bunker of his White Castle

Vowing “vicious dogs and ominous weapons”

Rolling in guns to “dominate the streets” 

His unhappy nation now his “battlespace”

             *

Black Lives Matter

Black Life Martyrs

             *

Asked Louis Armstrong, the smiling Trumpetman:

What did I do to be so black and blue?

               *

I can’t breathe

   I can’t breathe

    I can’t bre. . . . .

I. . . . 

     

______

Niyi  Osundare is a prolific Nigerian poet, dramatist and literary critic. A champion of free speech, his art and criticism is associated with activism. His work is taught in Nigerian schools and recipient to many Nigerian and International prizes. He sends this from New Orleans. June 7, 2020.  

“I Can’t Breathe” | New Poem by Níyì Ọ̀ṣúndáre was published on June 7th, 2020, with the tags , , under the Literature, Poetry, Poetry category. There are currently 31 comments on this article so far.

Poem for a Newborn Child*

Love peeps through the screen, many miles away
In rough, rumbled, beats of a new toddler’s heart;
Dark, with restless tiny fingers gripping winter’s tray.

Weird happy tingling pokes of a creation complete.
Commenced with many yells, and now another start:
New breath into a complex palette and dizzying street.

Eniafe, the one we wanted; the stylish, fanciful guest;
And his father’s edge in repose; art in blood of new hues.
His mother’s rock chiseled in the dreams of harvest.

The world will not end. Not now, for the fresh terrain,
and tomorrow, nods to better selves and better views.
Here is a new earth, embodied, like a bitty human grain.

He is here, bouncing. He is here, bouncing. He is here.
He is here. He is here, bouncing. He is here, bouncing.

___

* Born Febrary 14, at around 4.23pm, in Minneapolis Minnesota. Mother and son are doing okay

Poem for a Newborn Child* was published on February 16th, 2014, with the tags , , , under the Art, Literature category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Syria on My Mind

Nerve gases are no laughing matter
as hundreds of shrouds tell, in pictures,
removed from this world where allegiances
lay in voting colours and voting districts.

Another brown spot on the world map
spills around the palette of our apathy.
Thousands today and another, and more,
But history tosses us in fracas of wonder.

So, a click on the remote, and it’s gone,
shrieks of pain, and wailing siblings, countrymen.
A tab takes the blood of our screens
into another page with a dancing Miley.

The dead fare no better, though punctured
in lace around the flesh: hollow-point lead.
War is peace, until the air sours on the breath.
Decision hangs the wise on a noose with idiocy.

We are here again, a decade-long sobriety
in the same pit, different boots, and piety.

 

Syria on My Mind was published on September 5th, 2013, with the tags , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

1000th Post

From the distance of idleness when all that needed to be done were viewed and weighed against all that could go wrong, a thousand posts on a blog meant to document an educational trip might have seemed like an impossible dream. In the case of this blog, it helped to never have anticipated anything other than a desire to communicate thoughts and opinions day after day. Thus, when a day like today came, it would seem both grand and ordinary at the same time. Yes, a thousand posts, and about 355,375 words have come across these pages in thoughts and opinions, and touched people in different parts of the world. It means nothing, really, but as an outlet of thoughts and observations, it has been a much welcome therapy.

2013-04-15 18.41.35If the world has changed a single bit since the first post came up here, I haven’t seen it, as the bomb attacks on Boston yesterday makes clear. As I type, there are reports of police presence at Logan Airport in pursuit of a suspicious object. Back in Nigeria, the carnage caused and promised by Boko Haram in the North, and MEND in the South shows no signs of retreat. One politician escapes assassination by the whiskers on the streets of his home town. Another one gets reprieve from the federal government (even though a number of corruption charges against him are still pending in the UK). Margaret Thatcher is dead (along with an era of her type of conservatism). Mandela, George H.W. Bush, and Fidel Castro (three men that couldn’t be any more dissimilar) are on an in-and-out terminal list. The world is moving on, as it always does, ever on the brink o another war.

A poem then?

The Revel by Bartholomew Dowling (b. 182—)

WE meet ’neath the sounding rafter,
And the walls around are bare;
As they shout back our peals of laughter
It seems that the dead are there.
Then stand to your glasses, steady!
We drink in our comrades’ eyes:
One cup to the dead already—
Hurrah for the next that dies!

Not here are the goblets glowing,
Not here is the vintage sweet;
’T is cold, as our hearts are growing,
And dark as the doom we meet.
But stand to your glasses, steady!
And soon shall our pulses rise:
A cup to the dead already—
Hurrah for the next that dies!

There ’s many a hand that ’s shaking,
And many a cheek that ’s sunk;
But soon, though our hearts are breaking,
They ’ll burn with the wine we’ve drunk.
Then stand to your glasses, steady!
’T is here the revival lies:
Quaff a cup to the dead already—
Hurrah for the next that dies!

Time was when we laugh’d at others;
We thought we were wiser then;
Ha! ha! let them think of their mothers,
Who hope to see them again.
No! stand to your glasses, steady!
The thoughtless is here the wise:
One cup to the dead already—
Hurrah for the next that dies!

Not a sigh for the lot that darkles,
Not a tear for the friends that sink;
We ’ll fall, ’midst the wine-cup’s sparkles,
As mute as the wine we drink.
Come stand to your glasses, steady!
’T is this that the respite buys:
A cup to the dead already—
Hurrah for the next that dies!

There ’s a mist on the glass congealing,
’T is the hurricane’s sultry breath;
And thus does the warmth of feeling
Turn ice in the grasp of Death.
But stand to your glasses, steady!
For a moment the vapor flies:
Quaff a cup to the dead already—
Hurrah for the next that dies!

Who dreads to the dust returning?
Who shrinks from the sable shore,
Where the high and haughty yearning
Of the soul can sting no more?
No, stand to your glasses, steady!
The world is a world of lies:
A cup to the dead already—
And hurrah for the next that dies!

Cut off from the land that bore us,
Betray’d by the land we find,
When the brightest have gone before us,
And the dullest are most behind—
Stand, stand to your glasses, steady!
’T is all we have left to prize:
One cup to the dead already—
Hurrah for the next that dies!

Source: Bartleby

1000th Post was published on April 16th, 2013, with the tags , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Life, Like a Bus Terminal

Written in Abuja

 

tumblr_m8mzkwoDp11rtusgmo1_500Scattered guests, wayfarers from everywhere, travelers,

Gaping kids with idle feet around an open park. Idlers.

Noise, silence, antsy sights from dozen sleepless eyes,

We pass quick glances around the room, a shared sacrifice

in the early dawn of aspirations. From wary skies of town,

news hounds us in our states of mental undress. We frown.

We smile, laugh. We murmur in groups of vain distress,

Or point at a random object of attention: a funny dress.

The day breaks in bits around our ears, even louder voices

calling passengers into new routes into the world. Choices.

The past dances on the stage of memory, shuffling its feet

like the waking passengers traipsing towards empty seats.

Like before, each new step is a beginning into the cold wild,

with the certainty of the unsure steps of a walking child.

Life, Like a Bus Terminal was published on January 4th, 2013, with the tags , , , , under the Uncategorized category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.