Street children
Rummaging through rubbish piles
For sellable and recyclable iron and aluminum wares
They go about with trays on their heads
Tattered clothes their clothing
Girls and boys, wandering aimlessly
School bells toll beckoning students to school
But they run on the streets blocking traffic
With rusted bowls, begging for ten naira
Then, Others brought to school in tinted glassed cars
Others travelled abroad, the children of Senators
And Governor’s and Ministers, and Founders
These children on the streets, abandoned
These children sleeping under bridges, we don’t care
These children without parents and families
We left them to their fates,
We sleep in tall fenced houses, they sleep in mosquito
Infested shacks in the marketplace
Our children go to school
While they beg and steal to survive
Their parents we all blame
“Why do you born what you can’t breed?”
The more they spill into the streets
And garages, and gutters
Begging and living on the coins we tossed
At them, the more the devil employs them
The world is sitting on a keg of bomb
Pull them off the streets and rehabilitate them
Pull them off the gutters to school
Pull them off the doldrums into the light
The 21st century civilization promises
Wars have made millions of children hopeless
And homeless
Some greedy political gladiators caused
Greedy for power, wealth and fame
They armed these children as ‘child soldiers’
Unleashing them upon the society that has rejected them
Look to it before the world goes up in flames…
The Thrust of my Songs
I do not sing for those with Muse’s ears
And not for pieces of metals and woods and parchments.
Akwu Sunday Victor is also known as Akwu Ene’jo Adeyi. He holds a BA Hons in English Language and Literary Studies from Kogi State University, Anyigba. He is the author of Breaking the Cycle of Silence, Bourgeois Politics and Ideology in Vincent Egbuson’s Womandela, Reconstructing the Transitory Phases of Africa in African Poetry and edited New Voices from the Confluence: An Anthology of Creative Writing. His papers have also appeared in Ayingba Journal of Arts and Humanities and Ona: Journal of English Language and Literature
I love this poem. it made me think of all the things that some of us have that we take for granted.
ReplyDeletegod bless you.
and you look like a a professor. the younger version of wole soyinka