Wandering Man.

Am a wanderer

Searching for my essence,

The root of my fathers are sweet, the

Fruits are bitter,

Eye must set with the sun,

My feet walked the path of the preacher

And the dibia,

But their songs came from a punctured throat.

They grow fat and oily; the followers grow thin and dry,

Their medicine is made potent by our bill,

Their theatrics are contrived,

Am a wanderer

My fathers have no written records of their fathers

Generations of oral wisdom are setting faster than

The eastern sun

While we are sold away to white man’s religion,

They say ours’ is the way to hell

But they carry the oracles to their lands

And call them artefacts,

They perform appeasements to our gods

To understand their ways and abandoned us with

The book about a messiah that will come again,

Am a wanderer

Eye must trace my roots,

My grandfather married nine wives, his elder brother thirteen,

The younger one married six and my uncle, three.

Whiteman’s religion shackled my father, and he ended with one,

Until another appears, eye wander, and seek.

They said theirs’ was a great lineage

Of abundant wealth and peacefulness,

Without education, all was wasted seeking

The tender waist of young maidens,

Am a wanderer

I search not the abundant wives of my ‘fathers’,

Eye seeks the wisdom in the peace they lived. 

 

©2010