An afterthought after the news

Let me put the kettle on.
This idea won’t leave me alone.
You know the old saying?
The palm wine tapper is drunk,
he thinks the palm is short.

I keep picturing him, you see?
This fellow up in the tree at dusk,
gourd tied to his waist, humming.
He’s had a few good pulls
of his own work. The world is soft.
He looks down at the ground,
which seems suspiciously close,
& thinks:
“Well, that was quick.
An easy climb today.”
& the tree, of course, hasn’t changed.
It’s his own sense of things
that’s gone all compressed & cozy.

Now, hold that thought.

I was reading the paper this morning.
Something about our president, Tinubu,
sending troops to Bénin.
A “stabilizing force,” they call it. A “regional duty.”
Very solemn.

But I just saw that tapper again, in my mind’s eye,
swapping his rope for a flag,
his gourd for a dispatch box.
He’s looking at the whole map of West Africa
from his… well, from his certain altitude.
A perspective warmed, let’s say,
by a different kind of vintage;
the old, fermented politics; the strong stuff!

And he thinks,
“My, how short the distances have become.
How neighbourly and close.”
Bénin is just there, a stone’s throw;
a flick of the wrist,
a short, manageable palm tree.
The sap of order just waiting to be tapped.
How simple to send up a few good men!

That’s the thing about being in that particular state;
you forget the true height. You forget the tree
is rooted in centuries of soil. That the bark is tough.
That the wind up there, above the headlines,
is a different creature altogether.

You send a spark up a trunk you think is short,
just a little flare for light.
You don’t reckon on the dry tinder
of old grievances hanging from every branch.
You don’t feel the breeze catching the ember,
carrying it from leaf to leaf, village to village,
headline to headline, until the whole grove
is crackling with a heat you never meant to make.

And you’re still down here, at the base of it all,
squinting up. Trying to remember why the climb
looked so simple. Why the tree seemed so… brief.

The tapper, when he sobers, will have a terrible
neck ache from looking up
at what he had underestimated,
& a thirst no wine can quench.

The kettle’s whistling. Funny,
how a simple saying
can follow you around all day,
turning into such a worrisome nudge,
makes you wish some people would just…
come down,
& see the true height of things
before they light a match.

Majekodunmi O. Ebhohon is a Nigerian poet and playwright. He is the author of ‘The Great Delusion’, winner of the ANA Prize for Drama, 2025. He writes from Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria
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