Your hand is heavy,upon my brow
I bear no heart mercuric like the clouds,to dare
Exacerbation from your subtle plough.

Woman as a clam,on the sea's crescent
I saw your jealous eye quench the sea's
Fluorescence,dance on the pulse incessant

Of the waves.And i stood,drained
Submitting like the sands,blood and brine
coursing to the roots.Night,you rained

Serrated shadows through dank leaves
Till,bathed in warm suffusion of your dappled calls
Sensations pained me,faceless,silent as night thieves.
Hide me now,when night children haunt the earth
i must hear none!These misted calls will yet
Undo me;naked,unbidden,at night's muted birth
('Night' by Wole Soyinka)
in the poem above,Soyinka,

'The seas eats our lands' by Kwesi Brew
Here stood our ancestral home:
The crumbling wall marks the spot.
Here a sheep was led to the slaughter
To appease the gods and atone
For faults which our destiny
Has blossomed into crimes
There my cursed father once stood
And shouted to us,his children,
To come back from our play
To our evening meal and sleep
The clouds were thickening in the red sky
And night had charmed
A black power into the pounding waves.

Here once lay Keta
Now her golden girls
Erode into the arms
of strange towns.

In this poem,

From the West
Clouds come hurrying with the wind
Turning
Sharply
Here and there
Like a plague of locusts
Whirling
Tossing up things on its tail
Like a madman chasing nothing

Pregnant clouds
Ride stately on its back
Gathering to perch on hills
Like dark sinister wings:
The wind whistles by
And trees bend to let it pass

In the village
Screams of delighted children
Toss and turn
In the dim of whirling wind
Women-
Babies clinging to their backs-
Dart about
In and out
Madly
The wind whistles by
Whilst trees bend to let it pass.
(From 'An African Thunderstorm' by David Rubadiri)
The poet varies the lengths of the lines skillfully

Gabriel Okara's 'The Call of the River Nun',treats