A Grammar of Lagos
All cities yield their grammar,
even Lagos, sixteen years on.
I have learnt the concrete nouns
of places, the conjunctions of bridges,
Eko, Carter, Third Mainland.
I know the chaos of pronouns
inflecting themselves at bus stops.
I have heard the roaring verbs
conjugating on the Marina, fluent
in the gin-soaked pidgin of danfos,
the vanilla pidgin of jeeps.
I know that life in Lagos
is lived adverbially,
busily, showily, hopefully.
Lagos, babel of adjectives,
amorphous, arcane, mercantile, plain,
from terrestrial Ikoyi to aquatic Makoko.
Street by street I have walked its prepositions,
from CMS across the Macgregor Canal to Dolphin.
I have grown accustomed to the dialect
of houses, the shorthand of scenery.
I have seen the sands of Bar Beach edited
by the sibilant ocean.
Lagos yields its grammar,
eventually.
About this poem
I wrote this poem because I had a sudden thought several years ago that one learns a city's byways and streets the way one learns a language, gradually, with an instinctive understanding of its rules and logic.
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Submitted by missang.oyongha on May 04, 2022
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 45 sec read
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Quick analysis:
Scheme | AXBXXBXXXBX XCCXXX BDXXXD AC |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 822 |
Words | 153 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 11, 6, 6, 2 |
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"A Grammar of Lagos" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 13 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/125996/a-grammar-of-lagos>.
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