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Toyin Adewale

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Song of a first born daughter
to the beats of gangan

I am the first fruit of your loins.
Seasoned with grace.
Seasoned with salt.
I stride to drumbeats.
Flywhisks attend my hands.
Like anklets of brass, joy encircles.

I am the consolation,
born for the day of affliction.
I am the vigour,
the virgin seed,
roosting under coverlets of aso-oke.

Down the winding road,
I nurture the handkerchiefs
for champions who cry...
Behold the daughter,
your blessed harvest.
Your basket of plump yams.
Your scented one.

© 2001, Toyin Adewale

Toyin Adewale

Toyin Adewale

(Nigeria, 1969)

Toyin Adewale was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, also the birthplace of Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. Nigeria is a country where the average citizen would spend a quarter of his monthly earnings to buy a book, and where only ten percent of the population read any books at all. Toyin Adewale had the good fortune to be born into an educated family which could afford to send her to a secondary school, w...

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olayimika

Song of a first born daughter
to the beats of gangan

I am the first fruit of your loins.
Seasoned with grace.
Seasoned with salt.
I stride to drumbeats.
Flywhisks attend my hands.
Like anklets of brass, joy encircles.

I am the consolation,
born for the day of affliction.
I am the vigour,
the virgin seed,
roosting under coverlets of aso-oke.

Down the winding road,
I nurture the handkerchiefs
for champions who cry...
Behold the daughter,
your blessed harvest.
Your basket of plump yams.
Your scented one.

olayimika

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