#lagos
Before Ogun wore iron,
he wore music—
the same hands that forged the cutlass
tuned the strings of things unseen,
the same fire that tempered metal
learned first to temper feeling.
So when you came,
King,
Sunny as the harmattan sun
that burns without apology,
warm as the compound fire
that feeds the whole household
we knew whose cognomen you carried,
whose footprints you filled
without diminishing.
I met you first
not in a concert hall,
not in the amplified cathedral
of the wealthy and the ticketed,
but on the streets of Ibadan,
where the sun baked the laterite
into something almost sacred,
where my feet, bare and dusty,
carried the weight of a childhood
still learning what it was.
Your music leaked
through the louvres of strangers' windows,
spilled from the record players
of those who could afford
what I could only receive,
and I received it
the way the beggar receives the wind:
fully,
without owing anyone,
without the debt of purchase
diminishing the gift.
It was mine
the way Ogun's road is everyone's,
the path belongs
to those who walk it,
not to those who built it.
Your guitar,
not merely instrument
but griot's tongue,
oriki in six strings,
each note a proverb
the elders hid in plain hearing,
each strum a parable
the patient ear unpacks,
each lyric a lantern
at the labyrinth's entrance
the kind that does not say
follow me
but says instead;
here is what the darkness
is actually made of,
here is how to walk through it
without losing your name.
You were not merely musician.
You were blacksmith of sound—
Ogun's other trade,
the forge applied to feeling,
hammering raw experience
into the shaped beauty
of what can be carried,
what can be remembered,
what can be sung
when the original wound
has become something
the throat can hold
without bleeding.
Your voice
river of dark honey,
slow as a blessing,
deep as a wound
rose like incense
from the shrines of Ife
to the aerials of Lagos,
carrying the theatrics of the divine
into the ordinary afternoon
of a people who needed
to be reminded
that their ordinary afternoon
was itself a kind of divine.
You left scars of beauty on the soul
the specific wound
that only great art inflicts:
the mark that does not hurt
but illuminates,
that does not diminish
but defines,
that does not close
but becomes
the place through which
the most light enters.
From Syncro System
to Syncro Feelings,
you refused the comfort
of the already-known,
the warm repetition
of your own proven sound.
You reinvented
the way Ọṣun reinvents,
not abandonment of source
but deepening of it,
the river finding new channels
without forgetting
the spring it came from.
Her sweetness does not thin with distance;
nor did your sound lose salt by changing shape.
No predecessor sat
where you sit.
No successor
will sit there either;
the throne shaped itself
around you
the way the iroko's roots
shape the earth
they have inhabited
for a century:
the absence,
when it arrives,
will be
its own monument.
King Sunny Ade
today, as you turn seventy-eight,
the bata speaks your names
in rhythms older than your birth,
the talking drum remembers
what history forgets,
the Ifa of your art
stands open at the verse
that says:
a man who gave the people
back their own voice
dressed in beauty
they did not know they possessed,
this man has fulfilled
the griot's highest covenant.
The skies require no cannon
to honor such a life.
The music itself is the salute,
still sounding,
still finding the cracked louvres
of the houses of the poor,
still spilling into streets
where barefoot children
are learning for the first time
what they are.
Salute, King.
Your strings still remember
what your fingers taught them.
Your voice still carries
what your chest first learned to hold.
And somewhere in Ibadan
on a street the sun
still bakes to something sacred
another child receives your music
through a stranger's window,
not knowing it was ever
only yours to give,
learning only
that the wind belongs to everyone,
that beauty is not the property
of those who can afford it,
that Ogun's road is long
and older than the feet
now walking it
and that the music,
though it began before them,
begins again
in them.
© Lanre Adebayo
3d ago
May 31, 2026 at 11:15 PM UTC
I
How can my world collapse
and shatter like splintered ice?
Yet Dide soke stirs within my chest:
Rise. Lift. Awaken to light.
II
On Third Mainland Bridge I stand,
rooted like the ancient Iroko.
Ori mi — crowned in quiet fire —
my head, my path, my destiny.
III
Life threads itself through ash and grey.
Ọgbọ́n now speaks where youth once burned.
Faces gleam with polished smiles,
while silence gathers underneath.
IV
Still, I plant my hope across the divide,
a garden wrestling dust into bloom.
Akoko leaves bruise beneath my steps —
time measuring what I must become.
V
A broken vase — yet fragrance lives.
From shattered clay, perfume persists.
Light slips gently through each fracture,
naming beauty without shame.
VI
Fair is truth — and I walk renewed.
Breath by breath, release unfolds.
The Agogo hums through rib and bone,
peace ringing where fear once slept.
VII
The Gángan rolls with living pulse,
summoning buried dreams to rise.
To live is more than borrowed breath —
it is to dare, to stand, resist.
VIII
Lagos shimmers through salt and smoke,
towers lifting from restless earth.
Stone and sky lean close to listen,
hope rehearsing its quiet crown.
IX
Tell me, Ore mi —
shall destiny splinter like ice?
In this city of heat and hunger,
must vision bow to dust?
X
No.
I rise.
I name myself.
I gather every fallen spark.
For those who fall and rise again
shall claim the ground beneath their feet.
Ala mi does not beg.
It reigns.
Mar 9
Mar 9, 2026 at 10:29 AM UTC