By Elempe Dele, Benin.
Our people will forever live, the common and plundered people will live on, they have been tricked and sold again and again, they are sold and sold until they die and buried to nourish the earth to rise yet again.
Our people are immortals, peculiar and a chosen generation; they come back alive to renew the earth.
You can’t underestimate their capacity to endure and prevail through hard times.
Our people are often sleepy but not in slumber, they can be weary but never tired, they ar enigmatic but easy to understand.
They are vast in tolerance.
Some earn their living
By working mostly with their hard hands Just to make enough to get by, It takes all their time,
They could have done more and earn more, If there was time for them to read and study kinetics, algebra and chemical reactions, and talk about the world’s policies.
All of these takes time
I wish there was time enough.
Their stories are both tragic and comic:
If you listen to the breath of their laughter, you would notice depths of invisible cries, and if they weep, in it is that uncommon smile.
Everyday, they march out to get over the tiny margins of their pains, they try to walk across the grim lines of their subsistence living. That’s the work of Divine Providence, And that’s the silence of content you see them often give.
Their ritual is in the Divine through whom some of them are being milked by the men who profess often that they have seen Allah and God.
They are hungry but dance with light bones to melody of transcendental music of hypnosis: they give out their pockets in fits of deliverance…the dances, the songs, the stories in those hours of devotion become magic of prosperous dreams, even when they are workmen living day by day.
Between the infinite limitations of their possibilities is the hope from their Faiths and the endless yearning for miracles which put a cog in their realities of seeking the Divine in truth.
The plunderers and liars often violate our common people; there is always a changing theme: Salvation, prosperity to miracles… Even the government speak with different tongues…
I laugh, like the old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
Let the truth be told,
Who’s the woman that sees the PENIS without being glad?
There are men who can’t be bought and be sold –
The fire of truth burns in their minds, They know the movement of spoken and unspoken truth.
No one can hinder the wind from blowing.
From experience, time is our greatest teacher.
Who can stay without hope?
Our people would live on.
The only question is what’s next?
