Today all the oratory nodded into me are yearning to narrate their stories the call and response form in African oral narratives to help those of us who were shy speaking in public.



It happens during prayers. it happens during ceremony whose idea promotes group participation, every word following gestured display. Most of the poetry collection is touching and emotionally it shows natural nuances or the other from the proverb recited love in the choruses which everybody joined…

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Ede noh ede noh ede noh

Ede noh ede noh ede noh

I remember the stream

The path strewn with thorns

I remember its smell

The cassava odor with wild grass



The hilly and slippery bank

The mango trees as sources of shade

The farm flat at both sides

Like Odede’s breast in display



Ede noh ede noh ede noh



The stream the stream

It is the…

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Some night on the front veranda

Odede-meh cuddles me to her bosom

And tell me our stories

She told me about herself

The cassava girl in cassava plot

The sugarcane girl singing happy song

Of Esan lore in the cotton plot

A whole heart full of such stories

Just as her life with me were full

Becoming more vivid in her story

As the images mingle themselves softly

In the sing-song voice of…

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Her remaining smoke darkened teeth

Formulated the wordings in my brains

Story of my birth on a drunken night

Remembered exactly in a liquor daze



And the cocoa girls she among

Were ill matched cast off within the scene

And when Papa sang Mama into a lonely hut

The bamboo beds cracked a tread of its note



And the gathering soon found a voice

Chorus to the song papa sang

The dark spot on the mat

Edited the tune of my… Continue