DEATH NOT FOR THE QUEEN

DEATH NOT FOR THE QUEEN.

Hysteria
What ecstasy plunge the world  
Into a joyful sorrow
Upon the loss of a British landlady
On whom several pens
Have acknowledged a spirited grandeur
And a princesshood
Racing with a century
Filled with courtly courtesy and splendour

O Betty!
Thou art so imperial from a tendril
To a full baobab
Milking the black race
Brain and blood
From slavery to commonwealth
We are yours beyond the grave
Even if to us you bade goodbye
The blacks with you
Is bond by a spell
Hunger and starvation
We run to you table
Your fallen crumb is enough fat
Enough fat for our hollow cheeks.

II

Betty
Thou art a great physician
Our aristocrats beg for your syringes
Our medicines are impotent
Our herbalists are to us quacks
What dies in Africa lives in Europe
What is sick in our land
Is in Manchester with bones like a lion .

You made us know Sapphire
You showed us some gold and erased  our ways
Yoruba is a vernacular
It is as weird as the voice of a falling tree
Ovoramven who stood like lroko
Was nonetheless fell by own brothers
At the enticement of your dazzling mirror

Saanyan  is out grandfather clothes
Alaari belongs to our great grandmother
But they now live in the dunghill
Buried by history and time
On our neck is now a knot
Like a gourd
With a condescending rope
Suicidal
Our breath is gone

You built a world
Where the night is a joke
Where the dark has no strength
With undying florescents
Caging the most obstinate dark
Here we see our brothers' face
When the glowworms come to rescue
The night to us is frightening
After the noon
Is a world daily clothed in mask

III

O Betty
Like in the zoo we are beastly scattered
Who has such population of beggars
Some sleeping under the culverts
Many in the slums
Where mosquitoes' drums compete in orchestra
Making malaria to us
As free as the air, as the air so free

IV
Betty
There is nothing to miss
For london is London still
And Buckingham still
Drinks from ceaseless tap
And the black
On the back of a modern world
Is still in search of an Oasis so

Death is not for the queen
She lives ever here with us
As long as England
Flows with milk and honey.

Tope Ariyo September,2022 ( Realism in  an Empress Demise) Copyright Reserved