Poem: “Not in My Season of Songs” by Niyi Osundare

Not in My Season of Songs

Sigidi thirsty for a dance of shame
Craves a festival in the rain
Bees hum peacefully in a fallowing farm
A restless boy punctures their hive
With a crooked stick

You have poked your crooked finger
In the hive of my mouth
A chorus of bees would have stung
Were this my season song

Yes, I would have told you
About your swollen testicles
Which crook your legs
Like miserable bows,
And your lips thick like hippo skin;
About the elephant legs of your mother
And your father whose head
Rivals a buffalo’s own

Had you met me in my season of song
I would have told you what torrents
Swept your father to this land
Your father, the D.O’s shit-carrier
Who hounded kinsmen as tax debtors
And drafted people into forced labour
For the crumbs of the white man’s bread

You have really touched me
On my songless day
Or I would have counted all the rats
In your hidden shrub
Your uncle the Produce Buyer so fattened
On ugly money he looks like
A bag of cocoa with a small ball for a head
Or his brother the Sanitary Inspector
Who can extract bribes from a corpse

He whose forehead is twin
With a hanging cliff
Let him not peer into other people’s faults
The squirrel has lived down its fame for excess
It has put the penis below the scrotum.

— Niyi Osundare

“Not in My Season of Songs” is a thirty-eight-line poem by Professor Niyi Osundare. The poem has six stanzas.

• Sigidi is an earthen effigy.
• D.O. means District Officer.

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