Nigeria at 50: A nation of bewildered souls. Poem by Chris Ulasi

Nigeria at 50: A nation of bewildered souls

By Prof. Chris Chinwe Ulasi

Special to USAfricaonline.com and CLASSmagazine

Nowadays, on every bewildered Nigerian’s mind,
bemused resignation seeks solidarity with benign hope;
even as hope itself wither with the tide,
a swirling, rapacious current, sweeping against time.

Time is what we don’t have, although
you won’t know it by our leader’s
whitewashed slogans, with phrases undone
by their own past records.  Never again?

The people wished.  Their minds anguished.
Unseasoned misery that these needless rains
have brought along have rendered the ground
weak like a sponge.  A nebulous island.

We have become the captive Tiger
of a private emperor’s den.  An unwilling subject
of this nebulous study; we admit that it could be worse
as if it’s a contest between a sorrowful dream

and a hopeful nightmare.  We all sit in the dark,
so that there won’t be a rival to compare us to.
Not everybody approved of, or, resigned to this situation.
But even they must admit greater impediment

winding down the miles along their soul’s axle.
But I don’t want to see them stop.
I don’t want to hear them silent.  Nevertheless,
I see and here we are getting somewhere,
matching to our own drum beat.

Ulasi, a professor of Communications at Texas Southern University, is Executive Editor of USAfrica multimedia networks. Copyright © 2010

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