Are we Grand Children of Okara!

Last night I dreamt of Grandfather Okara, hunter of words carrying a clay pot seething with fermented poetic froth, African metaphors and proverbs of our anthills-. He shook hands with Dennis Brutus and Jack Mapanje as the pot gyrated above his head. Unfortunately something was missing i didn’t see any grandmother of African Verse. I jumped from the dream before i drink from the Honey Poet brimming to fullest with the Verses from our Anthills- Piano and Drums.

Verses from his Piano and Drums
When at break of day at a riverside
I hear the jungle drums telegraphing
the mystic rhythm, urgent, raw
like bleeding flesh, speaking of
primal youth and the beginning
I see the panther ready to pounce
the leopard snarling about to leap
and the hunters crouch with spears poised;
Then I hear a wailing piano
solo speaking of complex ways in
tear-furrowed concerto;
of faraway lands
and new horizons with
coaxing diminuendo, counterpoint,
crescendo. But lost in the labyrinth
of its complexities, it ends in the middle
of a phrase at a dagger point.
Okara left a nourishing and flourishing creative stream for young readers to quench their metaphoric thirstiness and to satisfy their insatiable addiction of creative dope . He sang of the realities and complexities of African societies their socio-cultural, revolutionary ideologies and cosmetic freedoms.
Poets and griots are teachers and prophets of their people; they should speak of the liberties, the freedoms, the doom and their realities of societies.

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