Poetic Thought
Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA
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Chidi Anthony Opara is a Poet, IIM Professional Fellow, MIT Chief Data Officer Ambassador and Editorial Adviser at News Updates (https://updatesonnews.substack.com)
Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA
Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA
Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA
Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Chidi Anthony Opara
Those were some fine lines you composed when your
& Don Pius Adesanmi’s dear songbird Kenny Rogers passed
On. And now that her time has come
It's Tina Turner who is being mourned
Tina Turner your great inspirator who helped
You determine the answer to your To be or not to be question:
To be a songwriter or to be a poet? One more question:
What's the difference? Thus begins Richie Havens’ song,
“Songwriter, greatest storyteller, ever so poetic, singing
Words of wisdom…”
Now we’re all feeling very sad and very sorry that All good things must come to an end.
My and our condolences, and by “our'', I mean all of us, including the saints, as in “when the saints go marching in “, including the sinners like you and me and Baba Kadiri, and not least of all, including the guys that you like to diagnose ”miscreants”.
Do you remember when you phoned me from Port Harcourt and complained tearfully, about “the miscreants '? I was maybe being poetic when I said “tearfully” although live and direct I was not there and then in Port Harcourt to witness the tears rolling down your cheeks, because I was in Stockholm, and sadly, I couldn’t be at two different places at the same time, but I could hear your tears and could also hear the wailing of the sirens, and the miscreants polluting the air and making their feeble noises somewhere in the background. I said “ their feeble noises” because I could not hear any explosives being detonated, the sort of explosions that you’d have been likely to have been hearing over there in what’s now a ghost town, Bakhmut, and if Commander-in-Chief Zelenskyy is not very careful, similar irreversible pounding will befall Kyiv and, too late, a fat lot of good Chief Zelenskyy’s patriot missiles will do…
I saw dear Tina and her Ike at the “Soul to Soul “concert in Accra in 1971 and backstage, watched the sunrise with Carlos Santana immediately after he played “Soul Sacrifice” and Gospel Singers (I almost wrote Gospel Sinners/ Gospel Songbirds ) had taken over the stage to do their Surya namaskar to welcome the rising sun
You Chidi may whine and complain and write poetry about our evanescent lives, all day long, for several lifetimes; coming to think of it, in fact, wasn’t it Songbird Melvin Van Peebles that sang,
“You can be a slave
From the crib to the grave
And the man will love you!”
in that his famous song titled “A Birth Certificate Ain’t Nothing But A Death Warrant Anyway”?
Less cynical, not at all nihilistic, as optimistic as usual a slightly different psalm from Bob Marley :
“Preacher man, don't tell me
Heaven is under the earth
I know you don't know
What life is really worth”
BTW, as the other bard said surely, from your point of view, not so positive, and hell no, I can also actually hear Don Harrow not liking this 👍
Translate that to Ebonics and it should sound like “Poetry don’t change nothing”
In a poetic poke at Ojogbon Falola; sometimes I wonder ditto, not Einstein’s “A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?” - but in the same mode as “ poetry makes nothing happen” , I sometimes wonder about the numerous, unending series of conferences organized by the indefatigable Ojogbon Falola and the question is, apart from the conference being “the event”,
Do these conferences make things happen?
An honest answer, please!
Well, not to worry, to be happy and don’t worry, that’s the beauty of religion, isn’t it? The optimism, that after a long life of shuffering stoically and shmiling, and after a life of struggle ending in everlasting death in this vale of tears, there’s the prospect of everlasting life in the Hereafter. As my Pastor Samuel has affirmed to me, on several occasions now; quoting Paul, “ it is appointed unto men once to die and after this the judgement”
I was going to say that maybe Tina will be reconciled with Ike in Heaven, but then again , as Jesus said according to Matthew 22:
Once the days of wine and roses are over, there will be no nightclubs in heaven, at best, only holy rock and roll; maybe there will be nightclubs and all that gangsta rap at the other place, a few stairs below…
BTW, it's The Day of Judgment that is to be most feared, the day on which we will be sent to Heaven or sentenced to life imprisonment in the hellfire, to burn and be burned there forever and ever.
Tomorrow, the 26th of May, 2023 is THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT for Messrs Peter Obi & Alhaji Atiku’s election petition to the Supreme Court.It seems that they would like to get a verification of some sort or other
Prediction: After the Supreme Court has delivered its judgement I guess that some of the Obidients on Nigeria’s social media will be foaming at the mouth as never before, buzzing with acrimonious fire and brimstone wishing hellfire and damnation on the innocent judges.
Indeed, politically speaking, “To suffer one's death and to be reborn is not easy”
Nduduzo Makhathini: In The Spirit of Ntu
Olasupo Laosebikan
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