When the day comes in Ajayi’s poetry

Title: A Day Shall Come Author: Olalekan J. Ajayi Publisher: Ebony Books & Prints Pages: 117 Reviewer: Nathaniel BivanReading on a road trip is by far one of the best ways to enjoy a book besides being at sea (my take, of course). The former is how I read Olalekan Ajayi’s ‘A Day Shall Come’. […]

Title: A Day Shall Come

Author: Olalekan J. Ajayi

Publisher: Ebony Books & Prints

Pages: 117

Reviewer: Nathaniel BivanReading on a road trip is

by far one of the best ways to enjoy a book besides being at sea (my take, of course). The former is how I read Olalekan Ajayi’s ‘A Day Shall Come’.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” goes that now ancient saying. Many people judge a book by its cover, after all there’s so much competition on what to pick up and what to dump when it comes to reading. So, when I saw the picture of people walking on a bridge at dusk (well, probably dawn) on the cover of this book, there was a curiosity to find out, to unravel why. Whether that curiosity was satiated at the end of the collection of poetry is another question altogether.  

Anyway, poets have a way of pricking ones curiosity by using a word that packs a lot of punch (or maybe, leaves you in limbo), probably either to assert their positions as poets, or well, just make you read on. This was how it was with the first part of this book. The word is ‘Introit’ and it leads to one poem, ‘Rite of Passage’, a song-like poem that seeks to tell its reader a little about the poet’s need to speak, being unable to resist the urge to let words pour from the fountain that is his pen, a journey he must share:

Tonight, I enter the forest of words

The moon a lamp unto my naïve feet

Like a prophet of old I bear no sword

Just calabash of ink and famished sheet

There’s history, there’s God, redemption, love, tears and more in Ajayi’s poetry. You are reminded about the sovereignty of the one who creates and fashions out man’s history. Not even the white man writes this history or dictates it, even when it may seem so. Man however discriminates and builds barriers where there should be none; this is the flow of thought in ‘Brother’s Keeper’: 

Before the burning flares 

We knew no boundaries

Now you erect barriers

Ours are hymns of peace

But you chant war songs 

When this collection leads one to ‘Love Themes’, it doesn’t disappoint. Love is universal and this poet is graphic when he creates lines about the physical, man and woman brand of it. Lamentations of betrayal, deceit, and more that leads to heartbreak, are found in a number of poems, the anguish of a woman who once held the eyes of her man, the cry of a wife who dares to reclaim her husband. These themes of love, relationships, glaring in everyday life, (including sparse sketches and footnotes) and almost visible emotion, strengthen this work.