My poem, Pilgrim’s Progress, written in the weeks after Barack Obama won the 2008 Presidential elections.
It appeared in Wasafiri’s 25th Anniversary Issue (Issue 59: Autumn 2009 | Everything to Declare)
It’s also quoted from, by Isabel Hofmeyr, to open her chapter in ‘The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan’, edited by Anne Dunan-Page.
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Pilgrim’s Progress
By Tolu Ogunlesi
On one side, an army of voluble Blackberrys,
Translating King into textese; on the other
A Klan of epithet dealers, sitting tauntingly
On electric mules. Stretched out around them,
A United Nations of graves and grave histories, watchful.
Above, frames floating, studded with names
Of members of an all-white dream team, possessors
Of star-spangled genes. A mist, a burst
Of bleak breath, rises, to dispossess a people
Of their dreams. Into this carnival will walk
A newborn, newly stranded
On the shores of this wreck-laden river.
Into this mist that roughly massages memory.
He will not be one of them. Nor one of us.
He will simply be the sepia-toned pilgrim who sailed
In, by dawn’s early light, aboard a paper boat
With a smudged name. His companions a straw hat, dust-flecked
Overalls, and a bale of cotton, wounded with tears.
None of these will belong to him. The only things he will own
Will be a funny name, tattooed onto a skinny frame;
The dust on his feet, passport of a pilgrim’s progress;
And a Blackberry. He will be naked, to be clothed
By all who see or hear of him.
In his open mouth, we shall catch a glimpse of all
The tomorrows that hold their seeds but no longer
Their yellowed deeds; all the coming days
That hold their breath, but no longer their weary debt.
(c) 2009
Tolu Ogunlesi 