released March 26, 2024

The Children of This Land

(from: Samarkand and Other Markets I Have

Known, Lagos, Crucible, 2002 )



The children of this land are old

Their eyes are fixed on maps in place of land

Their feet must learn to follow

Distant contours traced by alien minds

Their present sense had faded into past.

The children of this land are proud

But only seeming so. They tread on air but -

Note - the land it was that first withdrew

From touch of love their bare feet offered, Once,

It was the earth of their belonging,

Their pointed chins are aimed,

Proud seeming, at horizons filled with crows,

The clouds are swarms of locusts.

The children of this land grow the largest eyes

Within head sockets. Their heads are crowns

On neat fish spines, whose meat has passed

Through swing doors to the chill of conversation

And chilled wine. But the eyes stare dead.

They pierce beyond the present through dim passages

Across the world of living.

These are the offspring of the dispossessed,

The hope and land deprived. Contempt replaces

Filial bonds. The children of this land

Are castaways in holed crafts all tortoise skin

And scales - the callus of their afterbirth,

Their hands are clawed for rooting, their tongues

Propagate new social codes, and laws.

A new race will supersede the present-



Where love is banished stranger, lonely

Wanderer in forests prowled by lust,

On feral pads power,

Where love is a hidden, ancient ruin, crushed

By memory, in this present

Robbed of presence.

But the children of this land embrace the void

As lovers. The spores of their conjunction move

To people once human spaces, stepping nimbly

Over ghosts ofparenthood. The children of this land

Are robed as judges, their gaze rejects

All measures of the past. A gleam

Invades their dead eyes briefly, lacerates the air

But with in on sole demand:

Who sold our youth?

(Wole Soyinka)