Our country sinks deeper – a mounting heap.
Our leaders serve with lips – or not at all,
To power they grovel, to avarice thrall;
Their cockroachy conscience nor warns nor howls
Save to irritate our collective souls;
They pipe promises with fine flutes of mud
And snuff out infant dreams before they bud
The ornamental mosaic of their hearts,
Hard-cottoned fabric no charity earths;
They are but snakes that bite our dreams to death
But erect ladders for their kindred breath.
Is there no way out of all this sorrow?
Has Ham’s Curse doomed us to perpetual woe?
Then let us leave national grief alone
And swap a nation’s labors for our own.
Are there sediments in communal rain?
Then from this rain some pure water obtain.
Is it futile to patch this leaking roof?
Then our own corners we should make drip-proof.
Let patriots brand us a treasonous kind;
Fervor soon freezes in harmattan wind.
Let feeble-mindedness attend our names;
Adamantine will melt in sulphur flames.
Let it be so. We will (let them annoy)
Still build for selves some little tract of joy.
Written by: Emmanuel Oluwaseun Dairo
Edited by: Kukogho Iruesiri Samson
