By Ozichukwu Chukwu
Iconic mentor, quintessential statesman
Love him, hate him
Has infused composite generations
With character and confidence
Re-engaging in adventures of bygone era;
Yielding and healing;
Crafting rhymes of history and hope.
It takes courage to lead a vanguard,
Wisdom to be a statesman,
And patriotism to be both.
Torch-bearer of all times;
The puzzle of our era,
An enigma.
Touched lives and ignited places;
Turned between conscience and necessity;
Blooming in personal tragedies and rejoicing in tribulations;
No one has been so blessed
In this strange romance of “warriors”
With hunches and punches
This place is volatile
The stage is crowded
Witnessing a testimony of enduring beliefs
Too many battles and no battle field
But the native boy is never lost in the land
Hear some singing
And some wailing
Blurring the rediscovery of lost roots,
Lost mind and voice;
The animation of History
That heralded the siege and silent era.
All were united in facts
But separated by fate and in faith
As superstition and paranoia hold sway
None could pull out from the tiresome game of ego preservation.
And from a toxic environment
Reinvented the medieval with fatal masquerades.
In Abuja, the wilderness of astonishing beauty
And brutal exclusion
You refused the path of wheel tracks;
and rode
Through celebration Highway;
The guard tower was in your mind; but the radar your reflexes,
You changed the paradigm.
Today History holds spellbound
In retrospect I imagine
The injuries, pains,anguish and scar,
Those legacies in the cloud.
Grandmasters and Supreme Dames
Now face to face with truth
Will neither blink nor go blank
The subconscious has awoken.
Now the weather is clear
The bones will rise again
Those rock-solid mixtures
the “rains will wash away;
Winds whip into dust clouds,
Torrents carve out the unstable.”
If it’s “Not My Will”;
Can we say, “God wills it.”
As you keep building bridges,
Mending fences
Rebuilding broken walls
Summoning all to the objective square
With a spirit of forgiveness and forbearance.
Time is all-powerful
Fill the trenches, cover the ditches,
The man I know
The Enigma
Always will to dialogue
And to change, which
Again and again he’s done
Living all at no risk, at the crossroads
Today we share your passion
And live with the lessons
As the dust settles
It creates more dust
And the hurricane sweeps away
The footsteps,
The wind erases the fingerprints.
Slip but don’t fall
With hope we remain in
This long march in dry times
It shall be well.