SHOLA BALOGUN - POEMS

Shola Balogun, poet, playwright and filmmaker has been featured as a guest writer and contributor, especially in the areas of poetry, postcolonial studies and dramatic criticism to various magazines, anthologies and journals. He studied Theatre Arts at the University of Ibadan. Balogun lives in Lagos, Nigeria.

​Eyes In the Glen

​The earthen lamp,the wandering eyes,
The dimly lit floor,the rising shadow,
The sudden silence of lone whispers
In the undivided hour,
The woven hearse on wheeled rostrums
As wilted knot of hands thaw
To loose your drapes-
Then the coral dialectics of shapely ambits!impulsive
Elesin Oba
Would spare a long-loved clout for the pall
To untying beads of carousal,
Falstaff
In his lagging steps could not have been more
Unperturbed to part with brew
And the succulent fullness of dingles-

I stand tiptoed on reclining rail
And unflustered by the rants of lightsome gulls.

​Night

Rain on my tongue.

Threshing floor of pebbled camwood,
Then hidden faces and strange footsteps
On slaughter slabs,eyes swirling
Across the uncharted silence.

Thrust of faltering lips-Now
I could hear the whispers
Of the dark hour
And I taste this mint of my tears.
​

​Earth Poem

​Wine for your thoughts.

Raft of cornseeds,
Whispers in the attic,
The locked eyes in the helve,
The treading of the sole of the foot
In the winepress. You heard tell
That trampling tongues
Birth Belial roots
In the dark pool of rushes?

Child,meddle not with the shadows.

Stones tasted wine in time past.