(To My Mother In-law, Lady M. C. Egeruoh, September 30, 1942 – January 27, 2014. Burial Friday, March 21, 2014)
Everything worked out well
According to plan. We had a plan
To go through school and become
Doctors, lawyers, engineers, and professors
We’d walk on marble pavements
As rich men in limousines and private jets
We’d build homes as tall as trees
In shiny glasses and manured grasses
Our mothers would bathe in beachside saunas
And live to a hundred years, beyond blemishes
Our wives, yori yori and asampete
Would glide with the grace of gazelles
We’d tear down our crumbling schools
And raise new ones with marble fences
Our children would not sit
On broken chairs, like their fathers
Everything worked out well
After fifty years, in faraway lands
We built large homes in shiny glasses
And hid from parents who died of dearth and disease
We ran from ransom nappers and holy terrorists
And planted bottles that would grow round like stones
We were the marooned, the stiff-necked people
Bumbling zombies at airports and transit stations.
© Obiwu, March 4, 2014
