Tribute & Panegyric To Chinua
Achebe!
Norman Mwale [The PenPusher]
An extract from Chinua Achebe’s book titles;
Antihills of the Savannah, lmage of home,
Things fall apart, How the leopard got his claws, Home and exile, The drum, A man of the people!
Whenever l set to write some epitaphs
Before tears dampen the scorched earth,
I think of this your Anthills of the
Savannah
And the precipitous ants
Dragging into the hole, pieces of dry
Grass
As focused to foreshadowed seasons,
There after imagine how ants of the
Hills will circumvent
This wiggling, dry womb of time
Where hope is asceptic
Attached to this rag of moribund
Seasons
I see flora and nature birds
Their sunbaked leaf and defeaning song
Impersonate an ugly image of home
As Mother-earth eyes things falling apart
Like debris departing from an unwise man’s kingdom
Leaving in this home and exile
A comix of this a man of the people
And the Beelzebub,
Where a race persists in questioning how These modernistic pols influence life to
Their quarters;
How the leopard got their claws to stab
Through this terra-firma’s virtues
With the drum of gleeful songs sleep in
Deep silence
To rise no more and sate the sands with Just a single drop
To dampen these chopfallen sands!
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