Our Garden of virtue. Poem by Oluwatobi Odeyinka

When furiously reminiscing,

I feel like crying.

I may have to wail

of days that are no more.

My dark jaunty maidens

even in glades of poverty,

upheld the writ for sanity

in those days that are no more.

Bright and innocent girls

in the strap of discipline.

Sanguine and erotic waists

covered in shawls of purity,

those glittering days that I miss.

By the stream they frolic

talking away the worries of adulthood

they examine each others breasts

and jibe the ripe among them.

Puerile, those days that have gone.

For the plight of these maids

For this cradle of madness

For their sobbing hearts I say,

those days were different!

Our maids are now helpless.

Their butts are deprived of pride

Their garden is virtuously destitute

These make my tears race.

Our leniency has stimulated

a deluge of libidinous men

to beseech the unripe fruits

and pollute the garden of virtue.

I’m the woman right activist

I rebuke this profane act

of child marriage

I curse these evil men

who take the girl child for commodity.

It is indeed a menace

to the cultural prosperity

of our society.

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