I Sing of Change
— Niyi Osundare

I sing
of the beauty of Athens
without slaves

of a world free
of kings and queens
and other remnants
of an arbitrary past

Of earth
with no
sharp north
or deep south
without blind curtains
or iron walls

of the end
of warlords and armories
and prisons of hate and fear

Of deserts treeing
and fruiting
after the quickening rains

Of the sun
radiating ignorance
and stars informing
nights of unknowing

I sing of a world reshaped.

“I Sing of Change”—a short, hopeful expression of utopian desire in seven irregular stanzas—is the first poem of Niyi Osundare’s I Sing of Change.

It begins with a three-line epigram from W. B. Yeats in which awakened poets are exhorted to sing out so that “the whole earth change its tune.”

From the poem’s first stanza, in which the poet praises “the beauty of Athens / without its slaves,” readers quickly learn to appreciate Osundare’s perspective on the past and the present. The poet evokes “a world free / of kings and queens / and other remnants” of history. He brings to mind a world without iron curtains and calls for “the end / of warlords and armouries / and prisons.”

The changes the poet envisions are more than merely political, though. He imagines a planet where from the deserts fruit trees spring “after the quickening rains” and both the Sun and the stars dissipate ignorance. The poem ends with a one-line stanza: “I sing of a world reshaped.”

Overall, the tone of the poem is insistent, and the message is elegant and straightforward: The world is not a particularly good place (yet); and though it has hosted splendid nations that have produced beautiful art and worthy civilizations, none has been wholly admirable, nor wholly free.

Bibliography
Osundare, Niyi. I Sing of Change. Ibadan: privately printed, 1981. The poem is widely reprinted and is included in The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry, 4th ed., edited by Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier. London: Penguin, 1998, 283.

Categories: British Literature, Literature

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