Float.

When you take a ride with us, we end up with the most unfortunate circumstances and sympathy is hard for you to give to us. We astound you with the ease with which we fall into distraction.

We start the journey with the offhanded heed we give to the repetitive beckon of the garage bus conductors and then we, like the rest of you, take our place beside a window in the rickety bus that would take us to our destination.

Once all the chairs are occupied, we settle into a mystery— motion despite sitting still— it’s called a moving bus. Our destinations are chief on our minds, until they are not… We are of the stock that usurp this tyranny of singularity in mind and in purpose, for our mind does float.

In a hall proudly occupied by the eternal principles that exist where being bifurcates into mind and soul, we give a most electrifying performance. This performance indeed holds us captive till we cannot but usurp the authority of destination in a journey purposed for the same. We want to alight at Mokola, Ibadan, but we are infact, driven past this point because we are paying homage to everything we see as we drive past.

First, we start from the only passenger whose soul has stopped to say hello…

We pay homage to the baby strapped on his mother’s back… We savour the innocence of the clenching and unclenching of a tiny fist, marvelling at his own reflection in the translucence of the bus’s plastic window.

You see, we have taken a recession from the demands that pragmatism has placed on us to always be aware, because our soul is on an errand: Say a word of greeting to the soul in everything you come across.

This errand is an answer to poetry’s call; a primordial expectation of life from the ones who live in it, this errand is a call to savour life from it’s rich platter of variety, a call to be poetic. It is the whisper we give heed to when we let down the cynicism we effect like a robe and let our faces look up to the morning’s sunshine and enjoy it’s warmth… The call we answer to when we stretch out our hand and run it on the elephant grass on our way to work without fearing the itch that is sure to ensue from this. When we stop to admire, pluck, smell and savour the scent of a beautiful flower. A call to drink of life’s poetic wine.

It is this call we answer from the back of our moving bus as we pay homage to evey form we come across, savouring the poetry within.

We pay homage to nature’s many green faces— the dark green of many trees converging, the light green of the shrubs beneath, the even lighter green of the creeping grass on the ground.

And to the many bright colours that peep through the green convention of the bushes, we pay homage.

We pay homage to the flowing stream of blue that is the skies above. Our delight in them ripples through the world like the many clouds off white brooding over them with forms like newly hatched chicks.

We pay homage to the rank and freshness in the smells that waft up our nostrils through the bus’s windows. In them, we are reminded that life and death are daughters of the same principles, taking an endless walk hand in hand for all of age.

To the whispering loudness of the gushing river beneath the bridge that gives room to our automobile to vibrate over, we pay homage.

We pay homage to the bridge itself, for if it weren’t there, the whispering gush would become a roaring chaos, trapping us all within the confines of Yemoja’s cauldrons deep down at the bottom of the rivers like the myths say. Indeed, this disaster would cause a wave that would ripple out of the fiery waters of Yemoja’s wrath to the pages of a newspaper, but the ripples would cease and we all would be forgotten like many a wave before us. To the bridge that gave our bus a foothold, to the eternal One that produces the wisdom for the bridges of the soul, a foothold for the moving automobile that is humanity, the One who does not let us get lost in the dark, fiery waters of life, we give honour.

We savour the poetry of life in browned-up concrete walls that cover small houses built up with mud from inside, we savour the oneness of the children and the sand in which they play .

We pay homage to the birds that sing in the trees that surround these houses, we pay homage to the poetry of people that proceed from structures with very little knowledge of how one with the structures they proceed from they have become. We pay homage to the shadows cast by the structures, we are not in the mood to savour it’s darkness, but we pay homage still.

We pay homage to the bustling spirit of the market we are driven past; it’s face is a scene of wares displayed: clothes, tomatoes, vegetables, fruits— a picture with a clear blue sky and shrubs springing out from a faraway swamp as it’s background. The bustling spirit is engaged in a busybody dance that goes here, there, here and there again in a most alluring abundance that commands our soul to follow suit…

And we would have followed suit, but for the gentle tap of the bus driver and the embarrassing realization that we have been driven past our destination…

Practicality calls again and as we answer it’s call, we reckon the consequences that we have suffered and will suffer because we partook of life’s poetry.