Who’s Gonna Weep for Me

Scourged by a strange terminal disease,
the old man lay reminiscing on life’s voyage.
The rays of the sunlight were lost in this recluse.
The laughter and songs floating through the
shutters to him were just humming sound
from a distant land, where, once he had shared.

He is lost to the essence of life’s pilgrimage.
Has he lived too long that the world no longer
shared his vision and hope, he had willingly shared?
He’d been abandoned even by his beloved children.
Like a withering plant, he’d shielded them all off
who once cared about him, to the longevity of time.

Has he lived too long that his stories of heroic
exploits have lost their essence in this modern
swift society, that is immersed in visual realities,
where distant lands were conjured up in the speed
of thought, and the clicking of a switch or a button?
His thoughts were mere jumbles of grimy glooms.

His fading lights were his contemporaries lost to
the avalanche of time; those lined the dunes of history.
Would history records that he’d been a great warrior?
The slayer of the lions and tigers that roamed the wild,
the destroyer of dark spirits and winged creatures of the night,
the killer of Oferema and Peppenengi of the ocean deep;
adorning the lawns with the fragrance of their fat.

He stirred on his bed, in the distant horizon he could
hear, not see, the sound of the future; of approaching
Railroads and Motorways, of Airplanes and Race cars;
of the sounds of music and drumbeats, of the eerie sound
of the cyber world, and the boom, boom, boom sound
of exploding armament that would grace his precious land.

They may be late in getting to him; he would have long gone into
extinction as were his contemporaries, now robed in moss and shrubs.
Thus, our once cherished homes and communities in the Niger delta
are fading into extinction. Who gonna weep for the next community?