The stars lament his passing

     From Soweto’s seething streets to Bora Bora
Kings, Queens, and Presidents flood the sky
     With tributes and purple garlands

There goes a man
     In whose middling physical frame
Throbbed a giant heart. Prophet who divined
     One complex rainbow in a land

Ripped a-p-a-r-t by the colour creed
     He saw the Buddha in his Bible
The fallow intersection between
     The Cross and the Crescent

The Healing Wisdom of Orunmila*
     Whose universe is a house with a thousand rooms,
His metaphor came from the sky
     That looming umbrella above our common heads

Truth and Reconciliation
     Reconciliation without Truth?
When a savaged country needed a brave man
     To clean up its monumental mess

It unleashed an avalanche of horrors
     Whose telling un-plugged the tongue:
Widows embraced their husbands’ killers
     Orphans shook hands with those who dispatched their fathers

Between the Forgiver and the Forgiven
     Between the incubus of partial amnesty
And the absolution of evil
     There lies the aching complexity of wrongs without redress

To forgive and forget
     To forgive and never forget:
Which path leads to culpable amnesia
     Which, to the endless cycle of Justice denied?

                           *

Your Truth, Noble Shepherd,
     So straight, so Ubuntu, steered a troubled nation
Away from its self-inflicted carnage. But the scars linger on
     On the stubborn landscapes of our memory.

You who taught the world
     The largeness of Love
The inevitability of Courage
     Hope which sustains the Dream

——————

*Yoruba deity of divination, philosophy, science, and wisdom

Niyi Osundare, one of Africa’s foremost poets and academics, is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of English, University of New Orleans.