Thursday, January 05, 2006
Smuggled poetry and oil.
Sometimes you don't need to wait for an anniversary to remember. This poem was smuggled from his prison cell. (Perhaps in the future we'll be able to prosecute the shell executives. Stranger things have happened.)
Ken Saro-Wiwa
(1941 - 1995)
Ogoni! Ogoni!
Ogoni is the land
The people, Ogoni
The agony of trees dying
In ancestral farmlands
Streams polluted weeping
Filth into murky rivers
It is the poisoned air
Coursing the luckless lungs
Of dying children
Ogoni is the dream
Breaking the looping chain
Around the drooping neck
of a shell-shocked land.
