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Feigning Rebel
Tell us
are you real revolutionaries
or feigning kings
waiting for crowns?
We have been roused
countless times
by masked rebels of the night
telling us the system is bad
and the only way it should go is down
The fire in their mouth
lighted the darkness of our doubt
the timbre of their voices
seemed thick enough
to hang a million hopes
We thought
here at last the friends of the poor
who know the price of food
in the markets
what it means to wake up
without a penny
to live without a roof
in a family of disease and misery
we thought
they had arrived
who know the agonies
of soles without shoes
By daybreak
those fires are gone
quenched by the seductive dew
of a dawn of ambition
By noon
the timbre is scorched
by the sun of can’t
our hopes dash down
like melons on a harmattan twig
Our memory is a track of
throwers of dumb bombs
promise peddlers
and prostrating apostates
tiptoeing back to murmur
“good evening”
where once they shouted
“good night”
Hence we ask
are you real revolutionaries
or feigning kings
waiting for crowns?
— Niyi Osundare
Reference
Osundare, Niyi. “Feigning Rebel.” In Village Voices: Poems, 20-21. Ibadan: Evans Brothers Limited, 1984.
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