I
. . . We row life’s boat
With the paddle of your words*
Tell me now
Before the boatman arrives
Tell me true; tell me full
Tell me the tale in wind and water
The bird that sings the endless song
Where is he gone; where is he?
The Bard who built a raft of songs and fables
Where is he and his famous reed?
We have combed the coast
We have searched the creeks
We have asked the kingly Kiagbodo
For silent footsteps of the Titan of the Tides
The Kiagbodo asked us to ask the sea
The Sea asked us to ask the moon
The Moon asked us to ask the sky
The sky asked us to ask . . . .
The Wind is the towncrier
The eaves never fail to tell the roofs
The market square divines his absence
From its string of coral beads
The Bard who built a raft of songs and fables
Where is he gone; where is he
Tell me now
Before the boatman arrives
II
He was born
With a paddle in one hand
And a pen in the other
With both he ploughed life’s river
Arriving with boatloads of songs
And unforgettable stories
His voice was fresh
His vision frequently precocious
Pepper famous for a spice and sting
Which rattled the slumbrous tongue
He lived sometimes dangerously in
The grey zone between hard truth and seductive fiction
Rounded, original
He traced the native tree to its root
Berated the slavish folly
Of prodigals who throw out our household gods
To appease the arrogance of foreign faiths
He dug deep into the Delta soil
And its magic rewarded his muse.
His lines frothed like fresh-tapped palmwine
His words leapt like mudskippers across the page
Where is he gone; where is he
Tell me now
Before the boatman arrives
III
Bound to a country which abused his Muse
He spent his days in the risk-fraught
Entanglements of its tortuous history
The casualties, oh so many, and cruelly uncanny
The insatiable graveyard of the hopes
Of a nation enthralled by avoidable death
But how does one pluck dainty fruit
From a tree so persistently bitter
How snatch victory from such unspeakable rout?
Ask the poet’s ceaseless quarrel
With a country which refuses to become a nation
That inscrutable monster that preys on its own brood
The bitter aftermath of a war without winners
Its corrosive partialities, its fatal blindnesses
Its mass, unburied dead, the vapid proclamations
Of a state that never lives beyond the map. . . .
Master-rower on this raft, but alas, his paddle
Never landed him on a saner shore
But he was here
Man of his time and other times
He tilled our tears and leveraged our laughters
In his many and varied songs
We learn that the beauty we seek abroad
Lives so painfully unseen in our backyard
Where is he gone; where is he
Tell me now
Before the boatman arrives
*From ‘Gabriel Okara’, Early Birds, Book Three, 2004, p.76
* Award-winning Professor Niyi Osundare, poet, literary critic professor of Literature, penned the poetic eulogy for late iconic pioneer poet, playwright and dramatist, Professor JP Clark
