FAN THE EMBERS

THURSDAYS 6PM

"A system our society needs to debunk, where honour as mighty as it is, is relegated to an automatic attache to possession, position and progeny and no more a function of the content of character and the height of goodwill - the system of modelling on people because of their display of things fools can acquire via cheap inheritance."  

 -   Ayo Ayanfe

DON'T CALL ME FATHER

Don't call me father
Because you think I'm fifty,
and this one should be called daddy
Don't call me father
because I built a mansion
that will never afford you protection.
Because I fly in the executive jet,
don't call me father yet.
Don't call me father because a woman said I gave birth to you;
If I can't give life to you.
Don't call me father
Please.
Until I do
What love will have me do
With ease. 

FAN THE EMBERS

EVERY SATUDAY

"Those who built Rome did not run to Athens when the bricks were falling" - Deji Ige.

How we so think the pasture is green on the other side of our land, because telecast showed us how fat and fresh the dwellers on the side look. So, we ignore the strands of shooting grasses and withering trees in this our spacious yard. We sprinted back to our inner rooms, stores and kitchen to collect all the wares that make us refer to the yard as home and zipped them up in a heavy and distressing baggage. Strapped on our backs and heads, we looked forward to landing on the pastures of the fattened faces and so we looked beyond the brown grasses and the ill-looking trees in our compound that are spelling the fruitlessness of our home.

But, is our land not yielding because our land is infertile? May this question remain hanging on our wall until we get to that other land where, like the dwellers, we will lay in pleasures, fatten our bones and send refreshed photographs back home. Then, we shall sail back to unhang that dangling question.

We set for the "to" sail, dreaming of an affluent "fro" sail; dreaming of a soothing home-coming. An home-coming that is doomed to hang in uncertainty by the terrains between our dying pasture and the projected greenness; doomed by the heinous motives of our neighbors who now feast on our pathetic eagerness to transact us to those fattened faces, those presumed greenlands, where our dignity shall be trampled and our blood spilled to irrigate their pasture.

How we were caught in the heinous motives of our neighbors by our pathetic eagerness.

But as fate will have us share in his goodness, he made ill-fated our voyage; turned our travels to travails, frayed our skin with the hotness of desert sands, and sadly selected certain of us to vanish in the jaws of sea death. So that our ordeal of ignorance may be reported to the ears of those who will come fetch us. We have seen much of dare devils and blood thirsty demons as we stretch our hands to have the Greenland, and they are externally placed to wither our hands the more we stretch. What a victim of make-believe we've been. And for a lengthy season, that victim we were.

What a victim of make-believe we've been.

Now the searchlight of diplomacy had beamed on us and we were found out of the dark pit of slavery wherein our voyage dumped us. The guards of diplomacy had mined us out and transported us back to our yard. Our yard of brown pastures and withering trees.

As we behold these dying features of our sweet home, the picture our mind caught first is the hanging question dangling still, "is our land not yielding because our land is infertile?". As our mind fix gaze on this hanging question, it unhangs and another appears, "is the grass not green on the other side because someone watered it?" "Will our pasture not green if we'd watered it; does a land, though fertile, yield when it's not watered?". As our gaze unhangs these questions, we learn to behold our compound the more and we see it has more than the dying plants, there also is a brook!

Now that by fortune, we can see the yard again, we shall array every feature therein.

Perhaps, the trees will ripen their fruits and the grass will grow green if we relate the brook to them.

Ayo Ayanfe.