Candlelit

 

The iridescence

of the candle-lit

guides my foot-steps

to the back-yard at Umuidi

 

The evening wind

kisses the flame

dancing tarantella

its tongue full of orange-blue hues,

wriggling, like the waist of a nude hip-hop dancer

tickled with a thrusty, sensual rap

 

My heart caves in, as my feet plod the shrubs

i hummed in my breath...

to hold my heart.

 

I walked past my father's shrine

past Ikenga, shelter of gods stringed with amulets

i walked past the narrow path

littered with ant-holes

The cactus spread

its fingers to me

My foot-steps thread

this earth softly

softly,

because my minds

and heart are heavy

clamped with the twilight

of yesterday...

 

between my eyelids,

the mirror spread its large grotesque silhouette of mourners,

screaming on the floor,

wailing

sobbing

sneezing

then cursing...

 

Dig the grave here!

No, there… pointing (at) a tree-stump with finger blackened with the iodine of snuff

abomination, they cried, we must take the corpse to Isele-Uku

Our daughter must be brought home for burial!

lier, our wife must lie here...

This is ahatu!

You sold your soul with the dowry!

heritage, my arse, bloody witches!

 

I placed the candlelight

on the boulder,

And the wax snaked

to the hedges

mercurial, flowing

down the grave

spreading to the stones and sand

that buoyed  her eternal bed of leaves

  

From a distance

a swallow began to chirp,

its cry like shrill of insects

baptised with disinfectants

 

suddenly, my soul's lifted

with a fleet of songs

 

Do they remember my visit last April?

do they recite my prayers

like a poet hopping from verse to verse

from a memory bruised with serrated metaphors?

 

The clouds wander from the branches, it will be night again

And i see the thickening cloud romp homeward

like smokes uncoiling from cigarette of a mindless addict

 

 

 

 

Trims of Blood

 

This morning, the moon broke

the clouds with beams

as incandescent as the Niger

gushing beneath the bridges

when the sun smiles upon the tide

 

Everything silhouettes from my

heart. I sat beside the grave

And i knew the moon was

as guilty as all of us

 

See, to the edges of her crescent beams

were trims of blood

like a sword that butchered thousands

in the battle grounds of Plateau

 

Blood was once our river

our Niger...