ITEM SEVEN IS GUARANTEED!

 By: E.B Ogwiji

taste its fatal deliciousness

 I am aware that the chefs

clothed in academic gowns and umbrella hats

are cooking the meals,

For after these seven weeks

it would be time for the item seven

to be served plentifully in papery platters

ready to be pushed down our oesophagus

like gran’ma fed me pap when I was a toddler

Oh  ye sleepless deity

Thou who catches the sweat from papa’s brow

As he ploughs and tills the soil, day and night

Paying with the hard currency of hardwork

To shed my eyes of the scales of illiteracy

It is to you that I pray

May I lose my appetite on that day

When their unpalatable platables

Is placed on the wooden tables of wickedness

Shut my nostrils to its aroma

For ’tis academic death dished deliciously

When we throw our fists

It is normal for them to throw their feasts

When we attempt to break fetters

They give us those lethal letters

Fellow alutaites

I feel the pain, my brain isn’t numb

But mama begs me to be dumb

For she would not want to lick the streets of UI

Like mama Ekene whose sun has been returned to her,

dimmed and almost too quenched to brighten

her days of tireless hawking in Onitsha main market

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