ON LAGOS BEACH

"On Lagos beach"

source: pixabay.com

From sunrise to sundown
I tread this sand-hilling beach,
this shoreline that belts
earth's waist, beginning
here where lies my umbilical cord,
then pointing to the
Antarctica, Asia, Australia and

Crossing to Europe, North
America, South America, to
all lands, linked like my toes.
I tread this beach
and my eyes snatch
each scene of activities
threaded round the ocean.

There is the lady in her post-noon
enmeshed in a frenzy of
spiritual calisthenics, sure
of the ocean as final solution
as she rolls in the receding foam
muttering muttering muttering.

There is the cluster of youths
aligning the ocean's routine acro-
batics with the ailing memories
of their school Geography lessons,
wondering why the ocean shoots
not ashore her terror-toothed sharks.

There is the austere elderly ascetic
whose eyes lick page after page
of a weather-worn Bible.
There are the white-robed spiritualists
who find netted in each billow
the key to their lives' knots.

The unsmiling dark-bowelled ocean
roars her terror, pounding
pounding the yielding shore.
From the bank, the line
of rest huts quivers
as the billows chase.

Behind these is a parade of sky-scrapers
that once escaped the suffocating
Ajegunle, Oshodi and Apapa with
all their tensioned shacks. The sea,
sometimes, tenses her clenched fist
towards man or edifice.

In the boundless sky above
a mixed breed of birds bathes in the wind.
In the deep womb of the ocean
a mixed species of fishes flies in unison.

On the demarcated sand beach
a clustering, closely knit family of whites
passes, alone, in the crowd of blacks,
pierced by arrows of wondering eyes.

In silence a talkative emissary
Of steel-winged wind arrives
from far Tristan da Cunha
with the warm that

their cocks crow as ours
their trees grow as ours
their owl hoot as ours, but
their men speak a strange tongue.

The wind surmounts our mountains,
surmounts our man-bounding hills
and continues with her endless
overseas missions, in same tongue.

I tread, lonely, this beach, dreaming
of the world as one village, dreaming
of man as one rainbow of races
under same bluish canopy

Where the winds sail free
where the birds roam free
where man treads ruled lines

never looming free.

Glossary
Ajegunle, Oshodi and Apapa - names of villages close to the Lagos beach.

Tristan da Cunha - Guinness Book of Records' remotest inhabited Island.

Truly yours,
@samueloption

This poem is dedicated to all lovers of good works/poetry, nature and those who have visited (or intends to visit) the Lagos Bar/Lekki/Elegushi Beach(es). Indeed, this is my Reminiscence.