O Mother Africa! Poem by Okoye Stan. Ifeanyichukwu

With her gentle lovely palms
She curdles her baby on silk
Which lies soberly on her arms
Sucking the e’er flowing milk
Which drips from her breast

With a bright facial frame
She gazes on this little man
Who from her womb came
With her fingers on his virgin hairs ran
Stroking his curled hairs

She wonders on the bliss
Which lies ’head the child
Who unguiled and innocent is
Who on a long run would stride
On the journey of the unknown

Hei! A sudden scream
From the mother in a mild pant
Showing a painful smiling beam
Cause on her by the infant
Who just bit her nipples

The weaning time too abreast
’Cause the babe has got the teeth
To feed away from the breast
With the feed reflecting the feat
And a curdle above infancy

She in great care
Tends the little lad
To meet life in void of fear
Setting aside every fad
Which might undermine him as man

Always on her back he lies
Tied with the swaddling cloth
To comfort him as he cries
Amidst her toiling butt
Caring for him as her life

Ewoo! Another scream is heard
The loving mother wept
This time, caused not by the child
But a stroke on her back in depth
From a man unknown by her

The stranger with a mean face
Snatches from her the child
To a sojourn without a trace
With a promise to free the tide
Which may await the lad

The mother, for her child, wept
In vain her cry is heard
So dark was the night she slept
For her child would lack her guard
The future, for her, is bleak.

The stranger now with the child
Disbands him inward of his mother
Forging him to his own guild
That to his mother’s, a great bother
An unknown woe to the child

Decades, in a second, pass like tide
On the stranger’s bosom he rests alone
To a man grown the child
And his mother’s virtues aflown
Facing an unknown reality of life

Having robbed him of his self
Away, the stranger sends the man
To meet a world so unsafe
Where his mother he sees in tan
But to him an alien

The mother from her long night awakes
With joy goes to embrace the son
But the hatred of her he takes
For in him the mother is torn
And he knows her not.

Oh, what a tender love now lost!
That which unites the mother and the son
By the stranger’s hand, a knife thrust
Which in ages would be torn
Oh, what a painful part!

Oh, Mother Africa as the son’s mother
Her sublime values to the white elephants lost
Filling her with utmost bother
But which only at a brave cost
Could again be re-bought by her own brave.