IREMOJE

 

(Midnight. A gathering of poets set to give the late Ken Saro-Wiwa passage rites. In the background is a low dirge sung to some traditional musical accompaniment.)

 

 

LASISI: The carcass of an elephant is not a load

For the back of a camel

But already have I bent my altruist's spine.

Offshoot of a primordial priest,

Your elegist softly steps in like a midnight rain

Casual as the mid-morning pour,

I light the dragon candles of the passage rites.

 

The corpse of the hunchback excludes

The service of the camel

But, soulmate of a sewage bin,

With an open smile I accept the beckoning burden

Of the garbage cross:

Oluwere, the king-pin of trees,

Since the departed leaf must move

With the midnight stream

I spread my iroko's arms

For the burning pot of the ritual night.

 

 

Lasiribika; Mutumuyate!

Since the Burden of the night must sail with the spirit

Of the stream,

The world should not hang the loquacious dog

For its barking right

For if we do not bury the dead for the sake of God,

We must bury the dead for the fear of stench:

O!uwere. the king-pin of trees,

I book a tryst with ghosts

As no one hangs the restless ram for its wrestling right.

 

  

LASUN: A year is over

In another twinkle of a duckling's eye

I shall add to the crown of my pending grave

Yet another marble season of rolling dreams.

The nerves drunk in the orgy of ageing,

Like a petulant partridge in a sink of sand

My spirit bathes in the rising ashes of my early years.

 

A year is over

The wrinkling wrinkled year

Finally dances to the ultimate monotone

Of a tyrant's knell.

 

A year is over

A year of an eclipsed moon,

Incomputable graphs of stony decimals.

A year is over

Of a season's sordid syntax

Complemented by genders of fear;

Of sudden verbiage of the dumb,

With astounding adverbs of Time.

 

A year is over

Of sweet but sour smiles,

Dry memories of ambushed valleys;

Of idolised shepherds secretly courting but erudite wolves,

Prospect dreams,

Falling behind huge retinas of feudals’ eyes.

 

A year is over

Of guffawing ravens in allied barns,

Red-river hogs

Teeming through harvest evenings of fenceless farms;

Reminiscences of stingy means

Tickling angry armpits of unsatisfied ends.

                       

A year is over

Of wedding songs and funeral hymns,

Twenty births and thirty deaths;

Of lofty lullabies

Melting with group threnody on frosty nights.

 

 

ALAGBE: Forget the hues, forget the cries.

I think I have some bile to chew

As a sleeping Kora refuses to stir

At the mention of easy pounds

The ground squirrel turning its back on naked nut?

We seem to own a woe to chew

As a green turtle eyelessly looks down on its toppled shells.

 

Forget the hues, forget the wool.

Forget the hidden laughter in the mourners' wombs.

Forget the hues, forget the cries:

There is a grief torrent in the sobbing sky.

 

Forget the hues, forget the shroud.

Forget the echoes of midnight diggers

Penetrating the reluctant earth in our national yard.

 

Forget the hues but tell the poet,

Advise the elegist,

Teach my Magi the irony of the Cross:

Is this our intimate frog

Sleeping still on its back?

 

Tell me, when does an athletic frog lie on its back

In an impassive lake?

When does it kiss the salt of sand,

The feline spine of a mighty cat?

 

 

LASISI: Lasiribika; Mutumuyate!

Today, a litmus intrigue for a teething poet.

Far above a wedding song,

Far farther than a naming hymn

I robe in cultic apparels

To dialogue in dirge with departed beings.

 

From this stardom of funeral song

My eyes intrude into the pit of the dead:

Surreal spy,

I dabble into alluvial grapevines,

See a chagrined earth, writing an informal letter

To her distant sky.

 

In the temple of the soil

A century is faster than a human wink

Dark is paper, red is ink

On a footless table, where life is timed in Roman eons.

 

But for Oedipus's love

I would not have stretched my eyes to the German stage

Caesar, the legend, lured my feet to Roman courtyards,

But for the bestial deed of the General's rope,

What mouth would summon departed pens

For poetry rites?

 

Odia Ofeimun, oracle of the mount of words,

If we do not bury the dead for the sake of God

We must bury the dead for the fear of stench.

Odia Ofeimun, oracle of the cave of tongues,

The night is silent with a fleet of voices

The lagoon is dumb despite the roar of flood.

Then who can gather the eggly rubble of a fallen voice?

Owuye wuye wuyenke*:

Double-edged is the name of word,

For if we talk, we have to die;

If we don't, the end shall come.

 

A merchant of patient cobras,

My trade is very delicate like a surgeon's dream.

It is here in the eye of the earth

That words evoked a Nobel fortune from a muse's purse

And it is here in the eye of the earth

That words drew a parcel bomb from a hornet's sheath.

The poet's fate so sour with spillage of blood,

With our hearts as feeble as a mantis's shank,

How do we survive the harvest of hate

(Remember Brutus, remember Sharpeville)...

How can we secure our necks

In the waiting agony of the Pilate's noose?

 

Odia Ofeimun, oracle of the sea of words,

We are aliens here! Aliens

Like the wild legions in the troubled chests

Of the Testament's swines;

Then hold these tenement tunes,

Grant us the free mandate of the ritual night.

 

 

LASUN: The cock has crowed, the minaret is calling

The succulent breeze croons it's once again another day.

I do not want to tease my fate

I know I have a lengthy morning to grapple with.

 

The noon will be tedious,

More tedious than the surgery of a tortoise's brain.

Long and longer still,

And whether I like or lack,

The night shall drag like apartheid, and

Drag and drag like apartheid's train.

 

A season of coffins, unlike a Valentine night,

Is not expected to zoom in a jet.

The prisoner will not count the moons in the manner

The barren can crave a count;

One thing I wouldn't know, the same thing

You may never know

Is how a condemned sage, whom only heavens are sure a saint,

Reacts to the run-on rhymes of the prison's clock.

 

But why are they demanding the head of the poet

When I did not unmask a firufana masquerade

At the market square?

I have never contested the horsetail with the king

Nor contested the camwood with a native bride

I cherish freedom, so'have never obstructed

The path of a lunatic.

Yet this June of my waking dreams,

When the cape and coast are gay in green,

They banish the cattle rearer for yearning

To taste the grace of the grass:

 

May this dark night never end

If indeed the funeral ark must sink at dawn.

 

 

ALAGBE: This is Nigeria, an oasis of oddities.

When the prince eats with mucus in his nose,

The lips that move are dead.

When the queen lends her thighs to wayward dogs,

The mouth that talks is dead.

 

But let the words crack

In the terrain of the ears!

For although a giant will bow

To the threat of sting,

Orunmila* has granted the lizard

The rare privilege to feed on bees.

 

The pride of Enire

Onsa of Delta;

High priest of Elejelu

Luminous mirror of the Universe's eyes.

The fire of the black trinity

Who burns a forest of filth,

Leaving unscratched

The imposing face of the sacred sea.

 

Orunmila,

Metaphor of knowledge unknown:

Tonight, the living engage the dead in dance,

Be the neutral umpire of the ritual bout.

 

Igba funfun lor'omi

Igba funfun lor'omi

Eda to mowe ko kalo

 

 

 

 Akeem Lasisi (Excerpted from Iremoje: Ritual Poetry for Ken Saro-Wiwa)