Poetry - We Will Set Forth at Midnight

For Us, who missed the party that set forth at Dawn…

Tolu Ogunlesi
 
“We are refugees fleeing from the excesses of our parents.” – Dambudzo Marechera
 
I
Shall we envy them who set forth at dawn?
Dawn, when cohabitation
 
was the biggest crime
good and evil could jointly muster.
 
They went to bed with yesterday's sun
that they might rise, well before today's,

and set forth, as the tip of day
light's tongue licked the sky awake.
 
But as for me and my house
we shall set forth as midnight's babies,
 
sleepwalkers burdened
by the ill-packed bags of emergency.
 
Midnight, when Crime and Innocence beat
with the single heart of siamese twins.
 
II
They sing to us
of the need to appease Somnus early,
they, barbers to whom wisdom
has entrusted her grey Afro,
patrons with whom dawn
perfected the strip-tease.
 
pity is our gift to them,
our offering to those who realise not,
just how much we have lost
faith in dawn's promise
to always be there for us
 
and to those who will never realize
just how many cubes of courage have gone
into these cups of childly wisdom
that steam in our hands.
 
III
Early, at the feast of dawn, they gathered
up the kitchen, and set forth
on their illustrious journey
forgetting the fate that tomorrow awaits
manna smuggled in bags of pilgrimage.
and the manna died.
 
IV
And we, who could not set forth at dawn
have joyously settled for midnight
having little to lose, and everything to gain
from time and chance, masked deities
of this hour of anomy.

Comments

[Wirndzerem G. Barfee]

With matured and measured takes Ogunlesi once more impresses me with the subtle swords of generational strife that he carries in scabbards veiled the garbs of his present lines. From the lines that subvert Soyinka's autobiographical title, through Marechera's quote to innuendoes and more Soyinkian references(grey afro patrons, hours/seasons of anomy, set forth at dawn, the man died etc), we relish the cattish pawprints of his poetics that engage a criticism of the sins of a 'dawn generation' of parents that have thrown a present one into a road that only journeys into midnight:They weaned day from the lips of future generations and offered wizened teats limping from benighted udders in their place! Ogunlesi's is a deeptextured poem.