HAS ANYONE TOLD YOU HOW BEAUTIFUL YOU ARE? BY UBAJI ISIAKA ABUBAKAR EAZY

Has anyone told you how beautiful you are?
Well let me tell you
Your pouting lips gives me the jitters
And the heavy red lipstick
Make them look like that of a cockerel
I love the multiple shades of your skin
Yellow here, brown there and deep black below
Indeed, you are a paragon of beauty!

Has anyone told you how beautiful you are?
With that nose ring reminding me of Mexican bulls
How did you make your eye balls
Look like that of a frozen fish?
And when I look at those fixed long eye lashes
Oh, I am reminded of my kid sister's doll
Your face runs so smooth
Powered by a generous dose of the foundation
Indeed, lucky am I to have found you!

Has anyone told you how beautiful you are?
That fine brand of Brazilian hair on your head
The fine super glued nails painted blood red
Looking like bleeding flesh
And your pointed bust supported by cupped metals
Or is it your protruded bum packed up
To achieve a special effect on me that I should praise?
Indeed, your beauty lacks comparison!

Has anyone told you how beautiful you are?
You should see yourself when you take snapshots
Those squinty eyes remind me of blind Hausa beggars
The twisted hands and legs can only compare with
Children infected with polio
And those lips pushed out as if for a kiss
Aahh, what do I say, they literally kill me
I saved all your pictures because
They invoke a smile on my face at all times
Indeed, what else could achieve such effect
If not pictures capturing beauty?

Has anyone told you how beautiful you are?
Well, that person deserves a worse curse
Than that placed on Adam by God!
Haba madam! You are damn too synthetic and ugly!

Ubaji Isiaka Abubakar Eazy 2017

RAINFALL IN AMASIRI

A dark garment clads the heaven's face
Her heavy eyelids, like a turbulent haze,
Drooped in despair. A shaft of lightening
And a rumble of distant thunder claps--quaking,
As large pillows of clouds were forming,
Blotting out the tired grey sun.
Villagers--men, women and school children
To their homes came hurrying.

And then,
A patter of rain beyond measure
Came marching down on rooftops
Like  the clash of two armies on a battle field
Disgorging drops swelled the bottomless gutters;
The arid earth got drunk on swampy floodwater.

"How swift has the heaven's rage come upon us?
"It grieves my soul that we are affected
By the muss of an erstwhile flood."
Yet, some revel, count gains and comfort
"The world is doomed to extinction!" Others thought.

BLEEDING DELTA BY AKWU SUNDAY VICTOR

Delta
Delta of Clark’s songs
Delta of his nostalgia
Delta of his childhood
Delta of birds’ songs at dawn

It is the sweet throated songs of Clark
By the rivers of water
The home of Olokun
That calls my infantile mind to the Delta
Delta of a thousand rivers
Delta of the floating seas

And the woven words of the poet
Float as tide through weeds of the sea
Through the whole land and the world
And I knew of Delta of many waters
From the throat of the poet

Now Olokun has deserted
Her watery enclave
As giant trawlers barb her
Hairs with turbulent blades
Deep in the sacred heart of the sea
Earthworms of iron have burrowed
Their mandibles into the ocean bed
And their anuses of steel belch into
The murky sky gloomy waste

And on the land, iron rats burrow
Their ways into the heart of the earth
Munching at the cords that bind earth to earth
Guzzling rats with claws of steel
Breaking the breast of the earth
Carting away milk from mounds of life

This calls for threnody as the land
Once overflowing with the songs of birds
Overlapping with the hum of bees
Cascading with the rhythms of rivers
Now a churchyard of abandoned dreams
Now a metaphor of broken hope
Now a theatre of raging war
Now an enclave of desolation and starvation
Men and women go about with vacant eyes
Stripped of their land and the milk flowing
In its pregnant anatomy
Stripped of the sun and even of moonlight at dusk

Rivers flowing with faces; black-oiled faces
Faces torn and shredded by maggots from rotten oil
And everywhere, naked trees stand
Their clothing devoured by unseen milky flames
Amidst all these, a tube cut through the earth
Sea, streams, and erstwhile forest lands
In the tube, honey flowed into distant pockets!

Dec. 2016

Meet The Poet:

Akwu Sunday Victor holds a degree in English and Literary Studies and is presently a post graduate student at Kogi State University, Anyigba.