A POEM FOR MY GRANDCHILD by Tanure Ojaide

A POEM FOR MY GRANDCHILD
By Tanure Ojaide

With crude oil gushing into
slave ships
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 andand
 poaching inland as centuries
ago.