Remi Raji

1963 / Ibadan

Lovesong for my Wasteland, Sequence XLI

And suddenly my land becomes a bride again

In this memory of decimals
You're a soulful, full-bodied number
the even envy of oddities...

Dressed like the garden of Arcadia

Make the mountains sing your name
Make the valleys vow in your name

Let the evening sun rise in gold, in your name
Walk in beauty like the deer among hogs
The forests proclaim your antimony of flesh...

I too proclaim you, woman, wife, mother, lover...my land.

You're the principle of sunshine
The embrace of pleasant fires
The only death I wish in this wasteland

For Love is the only language I know
In a season of parched promises and shrunken memories
Love is the caprice of remembrance, the remedy of forgetting.

And suddenly my land becomes a bride again.
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