Temple of Words

By Mide Benedict  In the company of mourners Not all who mourn mourn. Amidst the thousand tears that fall Not all tears speak the truthful thought. They all gather to sympathize Rolling words on your carpet of pain Petting you with their lips of saw, They pretend to heal your pain While in turn cause disdain. They are the mourners of laughter They are the mourners of vainess. In the mist of mourning sighs, The red seas pour out to weep and cry But not all the waters are red Not all the weepers really weep. They tear their cloths and fall to ground They ask the grave not to sleep Or doze, But to look back at the folks he leaves But with their hands they blind the grave, With their thoughts they Murder the dead. They only say that to please the eyes, But to truly weep, their hearts Are shut. The preacher speaks the words of saints They respond with the response of peace. Amen! They say, peace To you, they all portray But their hearts lip-twist To ...

(setting: church; a wedding ceremony. Thematic pre-occupation: choosing between love and lust.) To say I do, is death to choose, Will I not bleed, if I sign this truce? To hold you close is pain to side. Will I not die, if you be my bride? Though beauty bows before your throne, For beside you beauty is stone: Your eyes are from Venus' source, Seducing me without a pause, Your lips like that of Mona Lisa, That could turn a king to a kisser. Your hips as high as the Everest, Going side by side without a rest. Your touch like that of a pure spring, Touching me, I dance to a tring tring. But are all this not vain, my dear, If for beauty only, hips and lips I care, Will you not run from me And me from thee When time is old, And when the lust in us is cold? If I agree to say I do, Will I not at last receive a boo From hatred, lust and odium too! For shame will be mine at last, If I die without a true lover's cast. If I sign this paper and bo...

By Mide Benedict  To give this purging of heart a Fallopian tube, With foreshadow, I shall announce its coming. To the statue of the great thinker man have I spoken, yet more chains And binds I got, for I have been tied down by my own ways and deeds. Years ago, I travelled to a village far and old To seek the words of a shaman, great and bold. He poured down his cowry and spoke some verses, But his gods were silent on my quest and hitches. Then I told him to summon the dead, Those heroes who made captivity flee in dread. And with the speed of time, he yielded my tongue And quickly they came, those living voices that once sang the freedom song. First was Lincoln, that slavery King, Who chased slavery out of America with his civil war Sting. I asked him to show me the way I should trend, But he shook his head and left me to my questions and end. In despair and grief I called on Luther The Black freedom Dreamer To tell me how I might be free f...

By MIDE BENEDICT  Now if I ask you what democracy is, you would define it, like everybody else, which is most likely to be the rhymes you have learnt in secondary school or perhaps read in a textbook or in a newspaper page, particularly the historical section, that according to Abraham Lincoln, the man who fought for the freedom of black slaves and also in turn was shot and eliminated while serving as president of the United States, that democracy is the government of the people by the people and for the people. You will certainly be correct and would even receive an applause for it, save you, if you are not in the mist of the 'non-oppressed' citizens, who will swiftly give you their own definition: the government for the few, by the few and of the few, only then will you not receive a send-me-to-hell swinging blow. Yes,  Yes, they know, It's oligarchy, in fact most of them are currently teaching that to their students or children or even neighbors,  but they h...

Arrest not your tongue and lips Resist not the wise voice of the gowns, skirts and hips. From man, you were formed by Him to stand To cross-taste your floggings and each expression strand; For such men who such words, they kill, their hands In doom they put and their bodies they find in sands. Julius, great, emperor, so sound and tall Into his sound canal was stuck the feminine call Beware I say! Of council! Of thy friend! But to heed the dressers’ voice, he refused to tend And at the back, his grave in blood was dug Brutus, towards his cup-shearer became the bug. Oh, such a great empire disappears like vapour Division and concord-slaughter began to pour. Oh pain, he left the womb, in crying and in tears Her then-still husband, dead now, but she…, left in fears. Arrest not thy tongue and lips Resist not the wise voice of the gowns, skirts and hips. MIDE BENEDICT

I sat a bench from where she stood, she- dancing and swinging her head from east to west and north to south. oh, her beauty so great that could make me mad, yet, I composed myself and looked away. she- Like a woman beads round her waist shook her bands till my eyes went there to taste again, it was a mountainous waist, that could make me mad again. I felt the pressure once again, to step forward to speak to her, 'can I have a Taste' my mind was set to ask her that which my flesh pointed out. I stood up and walked to her, I touched her and said my mind, but she- such a cruel lady she was, she painted a slap on my face, Oh my! I've never for once been humiliated like she did. Her slap gave me a hole in heart, I was humiliated by a holy devil who rolled her waist down the street. Not long, I looked to my left and like a dream to me, I saw my wife, boiling and rubbing her left spiky hands Her- Just arrived from her voyage To the ho...

Gbaam! It drops, into man’s last element And beside that which was formerly mine I stood to watch. Waahum! Man’s second element gave it a banging bathe And Beside that which was formally mine I stood to watch. Yee! Yee! They cried Their eyes were filled with the bearer of an ancient ark And mark of the purge between good and evil. Handkerchiefs became their chiefs Black gele and fila tinted their skins Dust filled the air and like the third element Into their nostrils it moved itself, But they never felt it Pain has been what they’ve been breathing in. Their saliva was bitter than the goal of bile in them. For beside that which was formally mine, They stood to watch. They shovelled out man’s first element ‘Pain has cut us deep’ ‘No’, some avowed ‘pain he called to make us weep.’ They sucked their salty sea with their cheeks Yet, vision’s gate never waited for one to die before birthing another. All these for a coward me, they spoke Me, a minus to t...