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4th Anniversary Issue |
Sentinel Poetry #49 December 2006 ISSN 1479-425X |
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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POETRY & GRAPHICS...Since 2002 Guest Editor: Nnorom Azuonye |
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Frontpage l Sentinel Poetry Online l Sentinel Poetry Movement |
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Ogaga Ifowodo
The Frightened Tree
(for Bola Ige)
Death strolled into your bedroom like a bosom friend for whose easy ingress you had sent the guards away. Death, indifferent and steady in hired hands, felt at home enough to spend just one bullet.
The careful killer in them saved the unfired guns, the hoarded slugs, for the next bidder for their skill. They left as they came, trailed only by the kindness that saw the guards to question their mission
sharing meat at a distant table as your supper grew cold. And they left jubilant to report, “Your enemy is dead,” to their hirer — the lethal shadow stalking our haunted halls of power.
*
Oh the madness never to end till the madman swallows his head! Arguments are not won or lost at the podium, a blow or bullet will speak louder for me, says the man of deadly ambition, wagging
his finger like a gun. But pity, you who watch us dance naked in our joyfully spilled blood and walk away — pity us who set our heads on fire to end the scourge of lice.
A folly loosed on our country at its birth forever stands reason on its head. And they govern, the best among them armed to the teeth with greed and spite for the discipline of words.
*
But for whom does the wounded house grieve? Whose entrance shall its shaking doors forgive – the murderer or the flying governor invoking God for his trail of blood?
But for whom do the shrieking cocks crow? Whose warped time’s minute hand is aglow as victim and villain cry alike their tears pooling in the same dyke?
And why is the tree in the street still, its foliage folded in as with a widow’s mourning scarf — because its leaves were fated to fall on soil that will not mulch with all the mangled lives?
Freetown(for David Anyaele*)
When they had chased him to the end of the world and frozen him between two fresh mounds in the graveyard, then thawed him hysterical to offer money, gold watch, shoes, clothes (all the world he had left, nearly as good as dust now), his knees sinking into the grave as he prayed, they laughed, amused by God’s silence, and one levelled his AK-47 to prove the new divinity, to save time for pressing needs of the revolution. But their captain remembered the cause, the dimmed glory of his city’s name; he silenced the gun for axe and matchet and in homage to freedom asked, “Long or short sleeves?” It was a riddle too hard for his heated head so he sank deeper into the grave and wailed, “Long sleeves! what I’m wearing, I have nothing else!” They needed to teach him the vocabulary of the new age for its choice sacrifice, so they set his hands on a fallen headstone; the bright edges of stainless steel flashed, dazzled the sun with the arc of the strike. Only one wrist fell clean, the other flailed, hanging on slender hope as the city’s defenders stressed the lesson and marching to another front, the old school that thought learning served the cause, they made sure to set at the head of the band the four boys abducted on their way to school a week before – promoted sergeant-majors of the people’s army and led home to enact their first acts of valour – each wearing back to school the dread-digit diploma.
* A young Nigerian double-amputee of the rebel war that ravaged Sierra Leone almost throughout the last decade, a war stamped notoriously in the mind of the world by the gruesome amputation of its victims by the rebels. "Freetown" was first published in Poetry International, special issue featuring English language poetry from around the world, 7/8 2003-4, and to be included in the forthcoming anthology, Voices from All Over, by Oxford University Press (South Africa) to be released in December 2006.
History Lesson
For the first time, history lost its wrench when a diary of defeats opened to Ethiopia. We were fourteen to fifteen-year-olds drinking in every word from the master’s mouth. It wasn’t childish pride that so moved us, it was the out-of-this-world names – like the sibilant Selasie (hail!), the tactile Tafari (your hand in it for a walk), Ras Tigré (you saw a Tiger!) and the muscular Menelik (superman)!
Menelik, more than a match for Mussolini, denying haughty Italy the glory of empire in Africa. We no longer sat at desks, black faces to blackboard; we had fled to the hills of Tigré, invincible tigers prowling for Mussolinis.
At term’s end, in the back of the Mazda, leaving boarding school in Warri for Benin, a dream of rivers opened my eyes to the Ethiope as we crossed at Sapele. And now I wished the car would cough and stop, catch the mechanical flu or migraine so I could merge hills and river in one course. Its waters were the darkest I had seen and seemed to me the inkwell of the world. Legend held it the deepest watery womb. I believed it. Under its luscious weeds was the aorta to the primal heart.
But cars bow only to their will, and this scorned my prayers, offering only to break speed, forced by the Don’t overtake on bridge on a truck finding the crossing tough. It was enough for me. And I confirmed the Ethiope’s majesty by the absence of boats and fishermen; the sacral silence mysteriously black. And oblivious to what local history had to say, I traced my river’s source to Ethiopia’s high ground.
NB: First published in Drumvoices Revue, Spring-Summer-Fall issue, 2005.
The Lunch Bag
A white cloth-bag, very domestic where it lay close to the dried parsley. She sliced into two equal halves, neatly, the last salami sandwich. To manly tasks! — such as opening and closing a brief- case to robe the moment in the authentic
suit of worthy business, such as wearing one’s shoes and calling out impatiently — anything distant from the tenderly worked aromas of food, as if only at pain of death would one sit at table or touch the home-made pie without swearing!
I squelched the goodbye kiss, pleading time. She said, “Here, a little lunch. And beer,” her wishes for a pleasant journey echoing down the hall into the street to kill the sneer of a churlish day. The train was on time, and soon the anguish of the image and the rhyme
to free a poem. Five hours after setting out, I eat the last sandwich and snap open the second beer, following her from the oven (where she bakes now, I know), to the garden (for the scented air), to the couch by the window (where words leap from a book to possess her mouth.)
I balled the bag — now empty, and looking odder and odder by the minute in a man’s hand — set on stuffing it in the bin beside me. Then I saw it, sitting on my lap, the voucher of her last shopping, folded and intent, it would seem, on being seen.
I studied the groceries. At the bottom was the supermarket’s oily courtesy: “Thank you for choosing us. We value you dearly.” Shamed I muttered: “Bless her for the timely lunch. And make forever perfect the hands whose gift glorify by touch the token and the common.”
Fear
He feels himself falling apart, cries I am ceasing to be I! as the road he’s traveling, bordered by the intimacy of familiar bush, by the fields of manioc and corn, breaks at the next footfall – as if at command of a wounded imp – into oiled sponginess,
and the friendly footpath of childhood, where he heard the world’s primal sonatas and breathed the purest air, veers at his heart’s drumbeat for the deep stream that taught him to fish, into a great river in spate, and the inscrutable mystery of an ocean, to stun his compass and his feet.
And he’s undone by the unfathomable moment, when the house whose porch should beckon with the warmth instilled in it by the sun of his life turns, as in a ghost story, into a dead tree, foliating before his eyes with the dark wings of monstrous birds and he cries: I am ceasing to be I!
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