POEM: SNAIL PICKERS

Paul Omokhoa

In search of snail,

I have come along this sticky slime on this snail’s slippery part

To seeking out its flesh.

Impetuous poet! I seek your quest too.

Our quest, I guess is gone to the west

Africa has snailed astray to the west.

Across the fence of time I saw some ants

Marching from the west to mount a colony here.

Here! Were this slimy road of this snail ends,

drawn by the scent of the sugar carried by those ants.

I saw the snail moving gently down this part to the very den were those ants nestled, to welcome them with a warm embrace but that embrace metamorphosed into a battle.

A battle for the flesh of that naive snail.

All that is left of that battle is this brittle shell I exhumed from the soil.

In time, those ants from the west have moved on.

The west have moved on.

But this snail has lost its flesh, Africa has lost its flesh, whether its flesh were bitten off and carried away by those ants to the west? I cannot tell. or could it be that this snail withdrew its flesh in self-defense into utter oblivion? I still, cannot tell.

Africa, has lost its flesh, Africa, has lost its self,

our culture is lost to a future,

we are lost to a future,

a western future that never came.

Our song is silenced in the symphony of western tune.

Our dance is a choreography of western of dream.

Our dress is drown in the deep stream of western suits.

Africa, is lost to the west, Africa, is lost in us.

All that is left of our culture is its shell.

Our culture is stocked in oblivion behind

the veils of those shells left in our villages.

Africa like starving snails is buried in the soil of our villages

So, it must rain here and perhaps everywhere.

And like the Legendry Biblical Prophet Elija,

Wole Soyinka! Let your literary rain fall also across every village in Africa

To resurrect the slipping snails buried in the gold mines of Africa’s cultural heritage.

My fellow snail pickers, we must get down

to the villages to pick up those snails that are there

but when we pick up snails, we must not fail to pick up culture too.

We must not fail to pick up Africa, for Africa is Culture.

Snail Pickers, a poem I would have performed for Prof. Wole Soyinka today at the UNIBEN main auditorium but time constrain deprived me. pls kindly give your criticism and correction for the editing this piece.