Night of horror, By Niyi Osundare

                 NIGHT OF HORROR*

    (When a cache of mine-size dynamite lives in a neighbourhood bedroom)

         I            

The year was young
     Our woes were old
The day plodded to a dusty twilight
     Unfazed by the harmattan hassle

Then came the wails of a lampless night
     When supper lost its way to penniless homes
And the night masticated the moon  
     Like a hapless morsel

The minaret was mum
     The bell tower loomed forlorn
In its tongueless height
     The wind wound a whisper

Round the restless lips of absent horns
     Pigeons coed ceaselessly in their busy holes……
And suddenly, so suddenly,
     A blast, a big, battering blast

And the evening’s blissful quiet
     Was shattered into a thousand bewildering shreds
The ground shook beneath our feet
     Solid mansions crumbled like cardboard boxes

Flipped luxury cars littered the streets
     Like piles of scrap yard junk
The road now is a running tale
     Of broken glass and mangled metal

                II

It all happened in the famous part
     Of a famous city; proud, gentle zone
Of the top cream, tempered by law and learning;
     Mapped out and built once upon a very long time

When place-builders doubled as people-builders
     And Statesmen were wise and just and clean
Architects of multiple mandates who knew
     How to turn a house into a home

That was once upon an epoch
     When leaders THOUGHT before they acted
And “life more abundant” was in every way
     More than an empty slogan

Now, the Grand Old Dream
     Has withered into a deadly nightmare
Where the Law is dead, the wrong is right. . . .
     A mountain of military-type dynamite

Has become a furniture item
     In a top-class residential haven
A corrupt “carry-go” security conspiracy imperils
     Our being even in our safest enclaves

A big battering blast has shaken us to our very roots
     Behold venerable old men and women crawling
Out of their rubbled homes, their heads double-grey
     From the ashes of their blighted bowers

Here they are in wreck and ruin:
     Glorious legacies of Master-Builders of old
Now houses of horror
     In this era of prodigal inheritors

* In the evening hours of 16 January, there was a massive explosion caused by loads of dynamite piled up in a house in a top-class Ibadan neighbourhood, resulting in human casualty and the destruction of many respectable houses. The vibration from the blast was felt 20 miles away. The most devastating peacetime blast in this part of Nigeria. Are you still wondering how deadly dynamite became a welcome domestic furniture item in a country of multiple laws and zero compliance. Ask the demon called Corruption and watch it come up with a thousand answers….

Niyi Osundare, one of Africa’s foremost poets and academics, is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of English, University of New Orleans.