The real essence of living

A review of The Human Condition by Oluwaseyi Adegun

THE whole essence of life is to serve God. Since human beings cannot see Him to serve, the best way of serving Him is through humanity. The scriptures say that human beings are the image of God, and so, whatever good that one wages on a fellow human being is waged on God. To commit sins is to negatively affect one another on this planet earth.

Poetry is said by artists and philosophers to be life itself since it is one special genre of literature that is capable of capturing a wellspring of emotions about the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of life that human beings have difficulty in articulating. Wonderful poems about life not only give us the key of the window into the heart of the poet, but they also romantically seduce us to explore our own desires. And when such wonderful poems are written in a lucid but simple language, they avail the reader opportunity to relate directly with the breathing words without ambiguities.

Oluwaseyi Adegun’s ‘The human Condition’ is a collection of 42 poems that are chewable and digestible like well-cooked biscuit bones and later forming part of the body metabolism – they linger on till they follow the body to the grave. Wole Soyinka in his celebrated play, ‘Death and King’s Horseman’ says ‘One is either born into his art or he’s not’. With this collection, it shows that Oluwaseyi is born into his poetry touching the art of the matter – the essence of life.

The 42 poems can be divided into five thematic areas: Familial issues;Time and Space; Nationhood; Inspiration and Motivation; and Admonition. On Familial issues, the following poems surface: Light of A Mother’s Love; The Father’s Voice; The Bond of Family; On Domestic Violence; Love and the Lover; and Superheroes,Briefly. Time and Space has the following poems: Harmattan; A Long Wait for Dawn; A Great New Day; Growing Older; and Fear and the Rapture of Victory (5). The following poems are under Nationhood: Save the Nation; Radical Optimism; A Brave New World; The Nation’s Duty; A Foreign Land; Sunset in a Promising Nation; Singing the Song of Freedom; The Search to Find Peace; and Urban Noise. The following ten poems are Inspirational and Motivational: Hope Restored; Inspired; The Free Sea; Dark Memories; A Brief Reflection; A Strange Writing of Sorts; An Ode to Grief; Paradise of Nature; Serenity, Desire, Air, Song; Dreams and Ambitions; and Love: Inspired by a Rainbow. In Admonition comes the following poems: Guard your Spirit; Contemplation; The Voice of Silence; The Want for Perfection; Listen Up, Do Not Cry; Seeking Knowledge; Morality of the Law; The Virtue in our Thoughts; Save Education; Advice for Drug Addicts; and Mirror-Watchers.

In ‘Light of A Mother’s Love’, the poet appreciates the mother with just a poem of thirteen lines, three stanzaswith a rhyme scheme: AA BB; CC DD; BB DD. The last Stanza reads:I crave my mother’s sweet delight (B) / In her soft way through weary night (B) / Sheds her vision of the day star (D)/ Fierce as a shark, saint of the bar (D). The rhyme scheme makes this particular poem to be lyrical. The poet in the last stanza as a day star wants her mother’s breasts, though she seems to be tired in the night. Whereas in ‘The Father’s Voice’ the child, after savouring the delight of the father’s love, is lamenting his plightand asks a rhetorical question that also ends in rhyme: Who hears the father’s pain? (A)/ They leave us to soldier in vain (A). In ‘The Bond of The Family’, the poet employs strong metaphors to illustrate how strong the bond is: Saying goodbye to family / Tears open every day. Protecting blood ties / As a steel our bonds are set.

In the theme of Time and Space, a poem, ‘A Great New Day’ stands tall. Written in a free-flow style in one stanza, the poet emphasizes the song he wants – a new song, a time song builds in love. He employs repetition of ‘Well’ from the beginning to drive home his demand that changes along the lines (time and space): ‘Well, I would sing as a restless child’… ‘Well, I would sing as a brave child’… ‘Well, I would sing for the peace of man’. Along these lines are demands. The demand ‘To hear my glad old father’s song’; the demand ‘To hear the glad and joyous song’; and the demand from man ‘To come and give a new song’. At the end of this well-written poem, when the father, the man must have sung his old song to glory, when all his treasures including his old song must have found their way into his grave, the children will raise a new song in love.

A battered nation needs hope to battle for its soul. And for hope to be authentic it must come from patriotic men and women. This is what the poet puts across to the reader in ‘The Nation’s Duty’, one of the great poems in the Nationhood theme. For the nation to be great, patriotic citizens must stand for peace – peace to men and women. ‘Inspired’ is another great poem in ‘Inspiration and Motivation’ theme. As the title goes, it is ‘An inspiration for freedom / To join in zeal and love. ‘We are in ourselves to do the rest’, sand when we perform an action, we are aiming to achieve something. But along the line of action, we may also make some serendipitous achievements – a surprise that may put an end to the problem.

The lamentation of the poet continues in ‘Save Education’. The poet laments the poor state of the country’s educational system and its consequences: The society has failed/Failed its own offspring/Little wonder the society is weak/ Little wonder there is hardly any improvement. Little wonder. A society without education is dead/Without knowledge, it is dead. The poet, however, admonishes the society ‘To salvage what’s left/To rebuild our ruins from ground up’.

The reader will find each poem in this collection very interesting and thought-provoking. The poet, born into his poetry, has indeed served God through humanity. The brevity and bubbling metaphors in all the poems will make this collection to linger on in the mind of the reader. A must read by all and sundry.