Waiting

Iyunade left our house eight years ago with her darling look and winsome smiles, set for the sojourn of survival. She dressed in a purple gown and head tie -her best colour match. Everything was purple, including her beaded necklace, except for that pair of shoes made of thick and black Italian leather Tinu bought for her during her last trip to Lagos.

She was waving to my Mama who was at the entrance of our mud house. Mama was also waving back in what I could describe as an emotional mixed feeling. Mama loved her, and she didn't want her go. She loved Mama too but she must go. This was a lady very ambitious. She had been telling me she would travel to Lagos to search for her success, perhaps Providence might look upon her. It was very certain that she was tired of living a village life like me. She wanted to explore her own fortune where it might be in unknown land.

Meet The Young Poet, Tunde Oladosu

The day I met poet Tunde was like a yesterday.  It was a day full of divine intervention because the circumstance that surrounded it went beyond my imagination. Since we have been living together like heavenly-coupled twin brothers, I always see him as someone with flaming passion and flair for literary writing but whose moon is still under the tutelage of lurking cloud of time. Besides being in the same department and from the same region, I undoubtedly find him friendly, mature, determined, humble, and cool-headed. He is indeed someone always ready to learn. Having being a literary critic cum writer, his works has always been a stream of muse for me. He is presently the production manager of Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), OAUIFE students’ wing. His poem ‘SAKI, I AM PROUD OF YOU’ was sent to me for editing. The poem goes thus:

 

                

Let me echo my sonorous voice for you

Saki Ogun o ro kin . . .

Like a pestle to its mortar

Your love dazzles at the beneath of my bosom

I am your memory, Agbede o ro bata

For in my heart I nurse the ecstasy of your fatherly caresses  

Saki my dear homeland

 If ship of life paddles me to unknown sojourns

How will my wayfarer forget his home after the voyages?

Through your glittering eye

I will always free-walk in the dark

I know my Saki

Yes I know

Only those with inner eye

Can value your sacrosanct presence

Never will I finger-point my left hand to you

For I am not a bastard who

Gazes his father with whelming arrogance

Our dance a jo jo

Our ancestral drum a jo lu

He who knows not the herbs

Calls it bush vegetable

Saki

The only mahogany that

Shakes the dense forest