Frederick A. Tengwan
HURRAY FOR BB
Hurray ! The justice god’s awesome warrior
Whose rapier pen like mystic scalpel
Gains the inner skull to paint the mirror
-Whose glass pane the pundit’s mind,
- Whose silver the luisant letters,
Which reflects not the made up faces
Of dotard cronies wielding fasces
Oh! Obasinjom warrior, your mirror
Like the surface of Lake Ejagham
Reflects but the unseen hyfras
Tipping the scale in the court of life
From the hearts of frenzied pelicans
Whose berserker priest from the helm
-Of self theocracy- decrees the ritual
Of Cain plundering Abel’s God given victual
Sentence on him for daring to aspire
To peace, and equality in unity
What infamita did you utter
Than that of holding the mirror
To these agents of death whose hawk
Swiped your sun unbetimes
Plunging it into doomsday’s chasms
Like Snow White’s rival queen conceited
Breaking hers for showing her beauty outdone?
Yet like Lukong’s leopard with no breath
You’re fearsome for you mirror is of the soul
And defeats death which is shamed in its jealousy
Live on BB, shine into our drowsy minds
That we may feel the pinch of your laser
And rise - our chicks from the hawks ton wrest!
Frederick A. Tengwan
TO THE SEA
High Tide
What great ire boils in you
That churns these beserk waves
Snarling at the pot-bellied Frenchman
As if to remind him this is no Cote d’Azur?
Oh Sea, what ire boils in you
That with teeth gleaming like a panther’s barred
You roar and hiss at the sunbathers
Who hug the sands in trepidation?
They say you once were calm
That you surface mirrored the sun’s smile
And you took the frolicking children
On their first trip to seventh heaven
O Sea at Kribi, what …
That you upturn the fisherman’s canoe
Which he seeks to board for his family’s livelihood
That-it is said- you once washed ashore?
Is it to cleanse his complacent cataract
With your salty balm that he may see
Which of his at the helm piloted the boat of state
All through this half century into a sand bank
On which the pot-bellied Rosicrucian prowls
Smirking as he garners for his state the spoils?
Is this frothing -which to the clapping children
Are benign smiles to welcome the port and oil shelves-
Spurred by your insightful knowledge
That they applaud but in farewell to their offspring’s victuals
Which their epicurean parents barter for a flea’s ear
Sponsored by the kickback accounts of the winning party barons?
I see you pummel the earth with logs stamped for export!
Is it in exasperation that it meekly yields these riches
Which you through rain and it through minerals you jointly tended?
Oh Sea! Blame not the land for it is armless and mouth less
Does its nakedness not make it victim of this warless loot?
Blame but its “leaders”, these opportuned successors of Akademos
Who pompously brandish parchments learned by rote
But muddy the professorship in paunchy self servitude
- The invisible hands of Babylon system!
Low Tide
O Sea, do you recoil from the minister’s fart
Which poisons the beach with an aura of thievery
Or from the whinnying of his deluxe four wheel drive
Which like a great knight’s horse
Finds its overfed master an unworthy burden?
Then recoil, lest his excreta may recoil and corrupt thy fish
With that cannibal gene of matricide
That makes him condone and part take
In the rape of Africa, his mother