Ballad Of The Peace-Keeper - Poems by Maik Nwosu
- By Maik Nwosu
- Published May 27, 2005
- Poetry
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Rating:
Maik Nwosu
Maik Nwosu, editor of The Source news magazine in Lagos, is currently enrolled in a doctoral program at Syracuse University, New York, as a university fellow. Also a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany, his first poetry collection, Suns of Kush, won the Association of Nigerian Authors/Cadbury Poetry Prize in 1995. The judging panel, chaired by Professor Theo Vincent, described him as "an important new voice in Nigerian poetry. Taking their origin from his immediate environment, Maik Nwosu's poetry works in wide lyrical sweeps, often brilliantly, dwelling, sometimes with humor and eloquence, on the black man's plight." His first novel, Invisible Chapters, was awarded the Association of Nigerian Authors Prose Prize in 1999. In his review, Odia Ofeimun, former president of the Association of Nigerian Authors, underscored its presentation of "a nuanced picture" that unveils "the unchanging ways of power as they have not been so studiously presented since Wole Soyinka's Season of Anomy." Obi Nwakanma, arts editor of Sunday Vanguard at the time, had earlier noted: "No novel, not since Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, has created, and with such power, the mood of our post-colonial society. Maik Nwosu's novel has finally declared the arrival of the new generation, and the inexorable passing of the old." Nwosu has also published a collection of short stories, Return to Algadez, and a second novel, Alpha Song. As a journalist, he has received both the Nigeria Media Merit Award for Arts Reporter of the Year and the Nigeria Media Merit Award for Journalist of the Year.
View all Entries by Maik NwosuPassages
i Princess
listen, maya, listen to the echoes of midnight stills
this song is for yesterday
out of phosphorescent wells in this darkness
I see in bold relief the footpaths we never walked
and i sing wistfully the song of your eyes:
rainbows of arcades and circles
that will linger with the dews of our morning
sad melodies of a chosen sacrifice
what blockade else could have buffered
the centripetal nudge of our hearts?
what gulf else eternally separated
the tentative outreach of our hands?
but look in tomorrow's mirror
and i see a kaleidoscope of futures
listen, maya, listen to the orgasm of the evening breeze
this song is for this day
now, no need for striving telegraphs
hand in hand we stand in the presence of the sun
on a wind-swept morning
with uplifted hands and uplifted hearts
those rain-chants and these wind-songs
will sing in our hearts forever, my darling
i know they will
listen, maya, listen to the anointation of festival
this song is for always
ii Jacinta of Bayangari
your acrobatic buttocks prod me
like circus prodigies
these dove-tail hillocks you've turned west
from the roofs of agbor
so oval now is your wry face
at the wisdom of those sate-grey roofs
we once pondered from a window-seat
hair shampooed with varnished semen
ears pasted to all the channels
your cackles cease but never commence
once so close I could read your fragrance
in weary envelopes
now so far away i can smell your ash-pits
across the challenge
that dwarf: your mother with defeated nipples
she used to placate the lulls
with kolanuts at the mammy-market
now it is tabasco for you
in the curdling embrace of reversible emporium:
the ostrich deludes itself
with grains of sand, jacinta
the sun takes no notice
nuggets are poor kerotakises
no sirers of princesses.
iii Aisha of the Midnight Presence
remember midnight in that claustrophobic apartment
and the little things that meant worlds then
woman, was it for nothing we danced together
and rubbed ourselves breast to breast
or did the hands of the clock
so de-freeze after midnight?
"song and dance of a season is not for all time
confluences arise
then a dancepast of ghosts begins
corporeal at midnight, without substance forever"
is that then your mid-morning testament, aisha?
water-maid of the one-night lifespan
these then vistas of the possible improbable?