Custodians Of Sane Mores Poem by Dela Bobobee

As we gathered together
feasted at the sage forge
in proverbs as red oil with
which we ate our hot yams
let aphorisms also now be
the lamp with which we see
in our dark future passages
of our foreign tongues’ intent

African tales by moonlight
the desserts we savoured
from old ancestral shrines
in words so pure to digest
to enable us pass it down
our progeny to hand forth
caution is the word for us
custodians of sane mores

scribing values on scrolls
does not mean verbosity
big words for young ears
to prove our worthiness
in strange lands traversed
for laurels in tasselled words
but in silent altruistic tones
preserving our own culture

we look into the circle of life
to dig out our sane folklore
but jettison what we are told
is fetish but not what we see
as true relics of sore sights
in the retina of all seeing eye
when we extol foreign myths
to shun ours in vaults of angst

it is not what we say that matters
but also the way we say things.