A POEM FOR MY GRANDCHILD
By Tanure Ojaide
refurbished into free-market super-tankers
Government assures its people of development
with proceeds from export and spot market deals.
My children have had no scholarships,
they can’t fish or tap rubber as I once did
the river transformed into a snake of a tomb
and the forest fraught with flares and seepage.
No jobs for them graduates in the oil sector
even as wells litter our family’s farmland!
Mobile policemen brandish guns in the dearth of prospects
and from above American Marines keep the pipelines safe.
Villages of imploring eyes marching, their hands up-
raised with green-leafed branches, are mowed down.
CNN & BBC Inc. embedded with Chevron reports the women
stripping to save their children and men from death are barbaric.
With my grandchild born, the new Stone Age
of a nation very black in the books has begun
with refilled slave ships refurbished into super-tankers
anchored at Escravos and poaching inland as centuries ago.
· Escravos: oil-loading port of super-tankers in Nigeria’s Delta State. Apparently the Portuguese gave the place the name because it was a slave-exporting port.