Safe Motherhood

She was conceived

By chance a female

Born unfortunately poor

Into a web of traditional values

So the local barber circumcised her

She grew up powerless

Uneducated, unfavored

Though a genius in

Seasonal child-minding

Got pregnant prematurely

An overexposed teenager

And bled to death at labor

Of her unborn baby

In the meantime

Our men change women

Like the loins on their groins

Making prototype sons

To perpetuate this stigmatization

And unfortunate daughters

As future sacrificial lambs

To this world of male baby syndrome

Safe motherhood – save our mothers

From the snatching teeth of

Ever rising maternal deaths

Oiled daily by the unrivaled

Arm of ignorance.

For 3^rd World Women.

 

by

 

Bode-law Faleyimu

Obstetrician & Gynecologist,

CARES- Center for Adolescent Research Education and Sexuality

Lagos, Nigeria

Written on Nigeria Independence Day 1990, Ile-Ife, Nigeria

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Mother Nature

Nestling in a gynecophoric canal
I paddled my way into eternity
And I saw a gynecomast father
Nurturing his motherless infant
With milk from his own breast

Escaping after metamorphosis
In a beaded cocoon of death
I heard a man boast of three testicles
And was allowed another wife
To drain his excess blood

Handing over the cup of knowledge
Before my final departure
The earth begin to swallow me
And I saw Mother Nature
Reminding me of the beginning.

Bode-law Faleyimu
            2:00 a.m.
            18th April 1984
In the Class Reading
Maiduguri, Borno State, NIGERIA
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A Call


The ambulance driver
Interrupted my flight
In the middle of the night
At the poised instance
Of making a son
That will not be a healer
And as I carried my stethoscope
My wife cursed
The patient fainted
My tommy grumbled
And I walked into the dark night
The beginning of another busy day.
                 

                  Bode-law Faleyimu
                  12th April 1986
Bauchi, Bauchi, NIGERIA
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Childbirth

As the sun sets
On mother in labour
The moon parted her lips
In sympathy once again
With the pains of childbirth
Each descent of the piston
Ending in a storm of cries
Twinkling of a new star
Conception resulting in
Varying stages of combustion
To at least prevent the
Extinction of Homo sapiens

As the morning rays
Penetrated her swollen eyes
She recapitulated in stages
The romance cumulating
In this unilateral distress
With each precious hour
Placing her at the mercy
Of the local barber's knife
Lo!  The forewater ruptures
Warm cleansing of the tunnel
To this cave that harbors
The result of human pollination

As the baby took
The first cry of life
Her womb stood unruffled
With blood of afterbirth
Gushing like a waterfall
Threatening continuously
The stream of life below
And in the aftermath
She swore of seeing in her dream
A blaze of white roses
On the graveyard of 'morrow'
At the treacherous hour of labor.

Dr. Bode-law Faleyimu
11.45 p.m. 3rd April, 1988
            Wesley Guild Hospital,
Ilesha, Osun State, NIGERIA

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Probability of Death

A pregnant woman
In the third world
Is like a lonely passenger
In a worn-out canoe
On a crocodile-infested river...

If the canoe overturns
The probability that
She will die
Is almost one.

* For an Eclamptic.

           Bode-law Faleyimu
March 1995,
Lagos, Lagos State,  NIGERIA

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Nothing from Something

While the developed nations
Are trying to learn
About the things of
Tomorrow that may irritate
Their yet unborn girls
We've learned nothing from
The common things of
Yesterday that killed the
Third world mothers ..................


* For an unfinished Research.

Dr. Bode-law Faleyimu
Center for Adolescent Research Education and
Sexuality (CARES)
March 1995, Lagos, Lagos State. NIGERIA

The Unborn Child

I started and ended

in this birth-waters

without a faint

knowledge of carrying

my suicidal rope

But drinking and urinating

in this interior sea

the rope elongates

in wedlock with time

tying and untying knots

at my neck's golgotha

Now 'am back here

with this same

octopus tentacle-

 

Tell me God

why I should

die again

in the hands

of my own

umbilical cord.

 

Dr. Bode-law Faleyimu

Written on 28th January, 1987

Maiduguri, Borno State. NIGERIA