The Iron Fist and the Hollow Crown
Paul Biya, that gnarled baobab, once cast a shadow vast and cruel,
His roots, deep in the soil of Cameroon, fed on forty winters of silenced dissent.
An iron fist, now rusted to dust, still clutches a sceptre of hollowed gold,
His mind, a fractured mirror, reflects only phantoms of forgotten yesteryears.
What monarch is this, whose throne is a gurney, whose sceptre a trembling cane?
A relic swaddled in ermine and delusion, propped up by puppeteers in Parisian silk,
France, the spectral hand behind the curtain, stitching his sinews to their colonial loom
A marionette king is dancing to a dirge, and only the empire still hums.
The Dementia of Power
Behold the tragedy: a man who cannot recall his breakfast, yet claims recall of a nation’s destiny.
His tongue, a wilted leaf, stumbles over syllables of statecraft;
His ears and seashells were drained of ocean, and he could not hear the roar of rivers begging for flood.
And still he rules,
A lighthouse stripped of light, guiding ships toward cliffs he no longer sees.
The Farce of Forever
Ninety-three orbits around the sun, yet he lingers,
A cassava root left too long in the earth, brittle, bitter, choking the soil.
The palace halls echo with the clatter of courtiers polishing his myth,
While outside, the youth, unshackled, furious, pound the gates with spring’s demand:
“How long will winter squat in the house of our dawn?”
Elegy for the Living Ghost
O Biya! Your epitaph writes itself in the cracks of your grip:
A reign that outlived its ruler, a nation gasping under the weight of your ghost.
You, who once named yourself “The Lion,” now a moth-eaten pelt in a museum of tyranny,
Guarded not by pride, but by vultures in suits, picking clean the bones of your legacy.
The Seed Beneath the Snow
But hark, beneath this permafrost of kleptocracy, a seed stirs.
Cameroon’s soil, though starved, still dreams in green.
The puppeteers’ strings will fray; the baobab’s fall will carve space for saplings.
For even the longest night must yield to the insolent persistence of dawn.
A Question Posed to the Wind
What is this man still doing here as President?
Ask not the senescent king, ask the fireflies mapping the forest’s rebellion.
Ask the rivers gnawing at dams. Ask the drumbeats in Douala’s dusk.
They’ll whisper the answer France fears:
“Winter’s host always overstays, but spring remembers its way home.”
NzeIkayMedia ✍️
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