STILL THE ÌRÓKÒ STANDS

They tear me down in their cubicles with quiet stabs and distorted reports, just to drag my image into the mud — still, my root holds firm, and I stand.

They subtly raise a hymnal on the pulpit to recruit the heavenly host into their envy, to dry the ancestral oil-well seeping in my marrow; yet the beats of my pulse record time.

They gaily gossip about me in the market square, slander me in the comity of frenemies; overtly, they even lock every door of aid — still the ìrókò stands, highly unmoved.

You who deepen the trench of envy and mend the walls of separation very high, what stirs you in my unbroken gait? Does my smile in the storm offend you?

As the moon sojourns after the longest night, stealthily climbing the backs of hills and plains; as the harmattan succumbs to the early rains, so I return, heralding the dawn, unscathed.

Surviving the night my silence was planned, into a dawn that remembers its own root, I rise bearing the unbroken gourd of my fathers, resolute seed of my mothers who refused to kneel.

From the shackles of betrayal’s altar and desk, from bruises inflicted by hearth and street, I rise like a fretful volcano that tears the earth. Against all odds, still my ìrókò stands tall.