Where are those beautiful days

When children pluck their happiness at night,

Listening to folklores under the mango tree

smiling at them like an aesthetic bud on a pristine flower?

Where are those beautiful days

When bothers groove jauntily in our local village,

Pleasuring on fresh fetched palm wine

From the elongated iroko tree,

And playing àyó to erase sepulchre from their turbulent hearts?

Where are those beautiful days

When sisters become cutlery of dance

Lacerating our moroseness with ballads and dances?

Those days we have sold in return for naira,

When Moon and Sun would smile at us

With their glittering teeth capturing old women’s hearts in their husbands’ beds.

Those days have now been exchanged with isolation,

And nightingale carries our ecstasies

To zephyr, blowing away our joys into ashes and smokes.

Our lives become bitter kola placed on a baby’s mouth,

And become sore wounds in a baby’s heart.

When shall these days visit

Us in our abodes?

Because this love is deteriorating

And these souls are melting like a candle?

OLALEKAN HUSSEIN is a Nigerian writer, a native of Ilorin, kwara State. He lives in Lagos, being where he was born and raised. He develops much interest in Literature and his works have appeared and forthcoming on Pawner’s paper, Terror House, Nantygreens and others.
He’s a student of a prestigious Arabic/Islamic institution in Lagos State (Darul Falahi).
If he is not perusing the holy Quran and other Islamic books, he’s writing.