Not My Business
"Not My Business" is a free-verse poem by Niyi Osundare. It is included in Cluster 2, Poems from Different Cultures, of the AQA Anthology.[1]
They picked Akanni up one morning
Beat him soft like clay
And stuffed him down the belly
Of a waiting jeep.
What business of mine is it
So long they don’t take the yam
From my savouring mouth?
They came one night
Booted the whole house awake
And dragged Danladi out,
Then off to a lengthy absence.
What business of mine is it
So long they don’t take the yam
From my savouring mouth?
Chinwe went to work one day
Only to find her job was gone:
No query, no warning, no probe –
Just one neat sack for a stainless record.
What business of mine is it
So long they don’t take the yam
From my savouring mouth?
And then one evening
As I sat down to eat my yam
A knock on the door froze my hungry hand.
The jeep was waiting on my bewildered lawn
Waiting, waiting in its usual silence.
—Niyi Osundare
See also
~*"First they came..."~ dir/so
References
- ^ Osundare, Niyi (June 15, 2012). "Not My Business". The Radical Truth.
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Other Cultures
Cluster 1 |
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Cluster 2 |
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- "Storm on the Island"
- "Perch"
- "Blackberry-Pickin"
- "Death of a Naturalist"
- "Digging"
- "Mid-Term Break"
- "Follower"
- "At a Potato Digging"
- "Catrin"
- "Baby-sitting"
- "Mali"
- "A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998"
- "The Field Mouse"
- "October"
- "On the Train"
- "Cold Knap Lake"
- "Havisham"
- "Elvis's Twin Sister"
- "Anne Hathaway"
- "Salome"
- "We Remember Your Childhood Well"
- "Before You Were Mine"
- "Education for Leisure"
- "Stealing"
- "Mother, any distance greater than a single span"
- "My father thought it..."
- "Homecoming"
- "November"
- "Kid"
- "Those bastards in their mansions"
- "I've made out a will; I'm leaving myself"
- "Hitcher"
- "On My First Sonne" by Ben Jonson
- "Song of the Old Mother" by William Butler Yeats
- "The Affliction of Margaret" by William Wordsworth
- "The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found" by William Blake
- "Tichborne's Elegy" by Charles Tichborne
- "The Man He Killed" by Thomas Hardy
- "Patrolling Barnegat" by Walt Whitman
- "Sonnet CXXX" by William Shakespeare
- "My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning
- "The Laboratory" by Robert Browning
- "Ulysses" by Alfred Tennyson
- "The Village Schoolmaster" by Oliver Goldsmith
- "The Eagle" by Alfred Tennyson
- "Sonnet" by John Clare
- "Flight" by Doris Lessing
- "Superman and Paula Brown's New Snowsuit" by Sylvia Plath
- "Your Shoes" by Michèle Roberts
- "Growing Up" by Joyce Cary
- "The End of Something" by Ernest Hemingway
- "Chemistry" by Graham Swift
- "Snowdrops" by Leslie Norris
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