Poetic License

Our poet of the week is Kingsley Alumona, who hails from Delta State. He read Geology at the University of Nigeria and is currently doing a master’s degree in Applied Geophysics at the University of Ibadan. His works have appeared in Kalahari Review Tuck Magazine, Daily Trust, The Tribune and Sun newspapers. Death and Culture […]

Our poet of the week is Kingsley Alumona, who hails from Delta State. He read Geology at the University of Nigeria and is currently doing a master’s degree in Applied Geophysics at the University of Ibadan. His works have appeared in Kalahari Review Tuck Magazine, Daily Trust, The Tribune and Sun newspapers.

Death and Culture

(For the African woman)

Black hour,

Lair of mortal death,

Below, it sinks the man into nadir,

Above, his widow’s pain fills the night.

 

Dead water

Sourced from lifeless body

Assaults her lips down her belly centre,

The soul of the world has never been shady.

Broken tears…

Forlorn, she cannot plead.

Death and culture are now allies

In the maleficent currents of the world.

 

Grey headstone-

Below, dark, and above white-

Unnatural, skewed and hard as bone

Like the conniving world in stark noonlight.

Mourn and mourn…

Desolate nights for her dread,

Merry days for the in-laws till dawn,

Day-till-dawn repast of immeasurable greed.

Blind culture

For the just and unjust.

The unjust makes the laws puncture,

The laws rob the just and swell the unjust.

 But, oh but,

In the core of her sorrow

Awaits the force of Justice in full thrust,

And injustice will in its flames to the hades burrow.

The Plague of Mortality

Man is the plague of creation,

His seed, pathos of time and space.

Death is no longer the end, but the beginning,

The black beginning that reflects no light. 

Humanity is not human,

Man is the disease of humanity,

Human is the cure,

The cure is in the core of man.

Immortality is out there…

Not in heaven or in hell,

But in the destiny of humanity

 

That is an illusion to human.