A Tour To An Island Poem by Dr. Ibrahim Lawal Soro

It was in a moonly night we met
We chatted our silence up
With a passioned scenes of smile
No noises all around only that of a rambling stars
Over us a charming hope chirping for a wandering hearts
In the forest of loneliness and shyness
Words are slaves
On the tongue of time that spoke us out
Beneath us it was that faded face of fear
But none of us care
We sink in the pond of art
That of the lips
With pens
That of the hands
With flowers
That of a weeping eyes for a gaseous moment
That passes
With our presence in a sailing club

Then we departed to a hut near a northern coast
Of a love
And in silence
We sailed our ship to a colourful directions
Of island
To ease the pain of distance
As we reached
As we liked to relieve the secrets of rainbow to the skying larks
As we hugged the existence of our passion towards poetry and camping
As we reached
As we heard a singing bird saying:
'You are welcome, and all the food here is poison! '

'We came to this island to exhale our poison,
We are poisoned by a lullaby of critics,
We are tortured by prose of those cities, '
We replied,
'We are poems of the forest
We are mountains of this sea.'

We said let us play
Then we played with the balls of happiness
In our field filled is the atmosphere with a lot of gourds
Of honey
Before us was the table formed
Wth a sand every human is friend
In our land no nuisance and trespass
We said let us read
Though we haven't a single book to read

On a shelf we built a house so strong
With our thought
And the silver of a moistured lips was our ink
We write our masterpieces on the face of a trunk
We sat recalling those chanting sharks
And a shivering of a sailing boat
We read the archives of wandering minds
We played as we wished like the child of a begging mum.

We knew ourselves, our feelings, and relationships
We stored our feeling in the cage of a singing bird
We smiled for each other in peace
No silence as that of a noisy island
No peace as that of a battlefield
No war as that between our hearts and arts
For fulfilment we slayed our egoistic minds
For fulfilment we forget the origin of our beginnings
We are snow
We melted on a shining rock beside a big tree
And our passion
Guided by an excessive reading
In the morning with the flowers
In the evening with a chirping waves
In the night with a flirting stars
Promised to prove our innocence.

We spent at least two to three days in that island
One of them consumed by the ocean we sailed luckily
In a dilapidated boat on a dancing ocean
We mean no city to fight our poverty
We mean no village to find a comical comfort
We mean to be natural
To step in the foot of nature
Beneath the shade of this colourful forest
That was the secret of beauty
To accept ourselves by ourselves in letters
To free ourselves from the manacles
Our passion that we can't control
Is the hands of devil in us

We pluck the flowers of happiness in reading
in writing we vomit that we consumed from the bowl of others
We die with a passion
We live with it in the coma of time
We may say, 'only poetry retained us in that island,
And only poetry drove us to sacrifice ourselves for a hungry sharks
That greet us with their tails on a waving form

We faced our fate face to face, as strangers
We smiled and moved on to our axis
And each price of our smile was creeping
In the hall of happiness and presence
In the midst of goodness!

We tried to disappear in silence
But none of our steps is mutual
So we remained as the time goes in our favour
Masterpieces of Homer and Lord Byron

Once in a day we call our parrots
To share its thoughts and pains with humans
Once in a day we tell them,
'Nothing is hard to get than a true faith, fulfilling friend, and calmness

This space you occupied is empty
Empty was the head of those falling traitors
That you hate
This island you spied is decaying with their impulses
Oh these hormones of wandering
Oh these breaths of monsters

We know each jungle has its own language
The language of this one is spicy, soar, and literal
For its words are the fangs of senses
For its sentences are the letters sent by soldiers
At war front the songs of the soldiers are of rifles
At war front the lives of the rifles are of soldiers
No hope for a lazy legs, no peace for a brave face
At war front schools are barracks, its boards are maps.

We faced our fate face-to-face
As strangers
We smiled and move up, daily
Each price of our smile is lingering
In the hall of happiness and presence
In the world of hopeness!

We gave ourselves the lizam of each other;
Our secrets are the keys that hold our future

We tried to disappear in silence but
None of our steps is mutual
So we remained as the goes in the parlour
Of our masterpieces;
Then Epic of Poet Home and Lord Byron.

Once in a day we call our parrots to share
It thoughts and pains with human
Ad once we told them, 'Nothing is hard get
Like a true faith, a fulfilling friend, and calmness.

We pinned our pain down with the aid of faith
In God we trust
Then with struggle
We survive the lashes of this weirdest life!

We are not innocent though we seemed to be
In the sight of those chirping larks

We must admit it; our shortcomings
And absence of muse
For we are faithful poets in all chambers of thoughts.

We promised to each other a promise
That Vietnamese soldier did to his forest
He never let let American cats to be untouched
Or his cat to be out its bag
For the tigers have a poisonous fangs
For the fulfilment they instilled in the atrium of their words.

We wrote our dirges on the pains of a kneeling ships
We knotted our eulogies with the veins of children's hearts
Lucky we are for the gift of life in the deadly island.

Dr. Ibrahim Lawal Soro
2022.