Melancholy Of A Negro Brother Poem by Folayemi Akande

'If I get a nickel for life's every downturn
I would be rich as gold, priceless as diamond
Princely as the speckles of silver that's never out-worn
And perhaps be pampered as queens and pearls bond.

If I get a nickel for life's every downturn
I will pay off death and live till the sun ceases to shine
I will stop to think death is the only consolation to this cruel life of mine
This impoverished perceptions will i forever shun.'

This was crooning of a Negro brother, sweet sadly sang.
When asked why such mellifluous verse is sad in tune
He said, 'to what shall I rejoice when life at my jaw throws heavy wang
When my hopes are easily washed to the sea like dune'
When my suffering days are long as the hands of the rain?
I am no heir to freedom long as sun's cruel smile forever reign'
I sing to life, to appease her stony heart
O life, here my cry. Where thou art?
As time wilt, so does my soul
In this hurdle I have given my whole.

If failures be emeralds the princess' eyes would be mine
And at her father's table will I dine.
Failure is ally to no noble man
Rather a disease that is restrained to the poor clan.
But how, but when, but why did I become condemned?
Life, you laughed and spat and forsook me.'

My Negro brother croons in dulcet melancholic rhythm
He calls his repugn an offspring of life's deficient algorithm.

'I am the remnant of war, the martyr of revolution
The spew of ignorance that is now a stench on civilization.
They say I epitomize insanity
The same insanity that guides the deeds in statehouses?
Indeed sanity you must be insane
Because insanity is the path that guides the true course of man.
Oh, sanity must be the finger that provokes the roar of a gun
Sanity must be the pen that signs the deed of war that sends men to their graves
Oh, the rest of humanity except I, must be a staunch purveyor of insanity.
For what's left of this world, a world i dare not say is left of nothing
But fragments of what i but only can blindly say beseems the rationality
Of the man who ordered three thousand men to die
So his daughter can wake each day to be caressed by the full bloom of the sun.
That's the perception of the man who calls me mad!
Because my shredded cloth and dying voice epitomizes
The lives of men he has ruined.
Because I told three thousand men to fight with one loud voice
Rather than with three thousand damning voices of guns and bombs
I must be truly insane if I chose not to die, not live, not to hang in the unstable sphere of time,
Not to see the sun bloom in the wake of tempest,
Not to be concealed in ruins of a grave I never dug
Oh, I must have being insane for not being a martyr to this devolution!
I have fought to live and strived to survive and to cry for mercy
And to beg for attention and to seek death to relieve me of this endless devotion
But this eventual desire of mine is ever termed by the sane man as saucy.

A sane, rich man once told me
That my feet are too damned to thread on the same path as his
That leather shoes are too refined for my feet
So I resorted to what will be a constant reminder of his utterance
A footwear that will cause more reproach to earth itself

O my life, their is more to saw-row in you
Than it is in the woes of pretty rose losing her beauty and glory to drought.'
Please, let me sing my song till the wind goes deaf, till the sky goes blind,
Till the eyes of the heaven doves are too mildewed to share their tears with earth
Till the cloud becomes too barren for deluge.
Till the tide grows too old and too frail to make the sea's belly swell
Let me sing my song till the sane man realizes he is the one insane.'

These were melancholies of a Negro brother
Who life has utterly scorned beyond pacifiable border.