Homeland

What are the things that grow here?

Those that grow from stone, lacking

life and root, flesh and water

things cut as caps

for the baldness of stone.

What are the things that flourish here?

Those that rise from dust, without

teeth for the nourishment of sand

things frail and fallen, that fly

with the winds in sweat and sadness.

And what are the harvests here?

Of corn crippled before teething

Of tubers poorer than the planted head

Of tomatoes rotted before ripening

Of sand and gravel, burntbush and anthills.

What are the dwelling places?

Houses bitter like a weeping face

homes grievous like smoke-pipes

walls held up by pillars of anguish,

where lament makes bed and roof.

And how do children grow here?

Out of wombs whipped with want

and desire, the burst forth, to be

tough like street leather, sweet and hardy

like sugarcane, to learn love in safe time.

Here, we will walk the streets

where laughter is hidden in deep places

and stores cannot shut their doors

choked with hearts that bleed from gathered wounds

and you will see nothing can grow here but agony.

Ogaga Ifowodo

3 October 1992

He Lay Dying at Oshodi

You can trust the headless scream of Oshodi

to bury within its cemetery

a frothful battle for living or dying.

And if this concerned a child of twelve

watching death roll to her on rail tracks

what sympathy can come

from the raw-peppered heart of such a horde?

You can trust Oshodi to undertake

the wake of the living.

A mere girl of twelve!

She clutched the earth, begging life

in fistfuls of mud, foaming

in her feverish plea for a healing hand.

We filed past, casting half-glances

pleading in turn, impotent worlds of sorrow

where love, lacking muscle, weeps in little graves,

hurrying through the broken fence

to flee malediction in her fading eyes.

The train tolled its horn as I crossed the fence

and I wondered if she was bound for home

before the fever made a fire in her bones,

wondered if home was her deathbed of murk

where Oshodi profanes life and death.

I passed again the scene of her mortal battle

and saw the fight she waged then

as she lay dying by the railbars

hoping to pluck a ministering hand

from the crowd deader than her dying self.

I too filed past her on that day,

forced to pay last respects to one

more in need of life than mourning.

Dear girl, twined afresh by guilt

I plead breathing corpses of your mourners

in mitigation. I plead flesh that fell

with yours, leaving only rattling bones

that toll your silent cry forever

in the wilds of a headless world.

Ogaga Ifowodo

31 December 1990

If One Looks at Your Face

If one looks at your face

your bosom, your waist

he will free laughter

from the teeth of crocodiles

and wash his face again.

Your eyes are the kitchen stoves

whose fires will never quench

not even in Noah's flood,

your eyes are where we may roast

stones to bread for famished mouths.

Your breast, meat-melon multiplied

to cure the thirst of multitudes

enough for my famished mouth,

enough for my hunger-dredged gullet

I claim against tooth, nail water.

Your waist is the continent's coast of gold,

draws envious claws to pillage,

but there, is my mine of laughter

crowned with the glitter of dust,

round it I make a fence of fire with my arms.

And when a stranger comes

beaten by streets and winds

to lay camp beneath your roofed eyes

you wash his face with his lost laughter

and kill one more crocodile from the neighbourhood.

Ogaga Ifowodo

29 January 1992

(From Homeland & Other Poems (1998, Ibadan, Kraft Books) and Homeland (Selected poems in German-English issue) (1998, Stuttgart, Edition Solitude).

God Punish You, Lord Lugard

The traffic warden's white-and-yellow sleeve

stopped our transport, a Lagos mini-bus

bought from one of the rust heaps of Europe ?

part of the great scheme to gain reprieve

for the city's long-suffering commuters.

A horde of beggars swarmed the bus; he beat

all to the vantage position in front

of the open door. He had good manners,

and what he lacked, such as the Queen's english,

he faced with uncommon calm and courage;

blind and battered, with a withered left arm,

not for him the plain and unlearned

"Help me for chop, I beg. God go bless you."

Some flourish, or polish, he thought

would persuade far more than suffering?s worst gown.

And so he: "Good day, brodas and sistas.

Half massy on me, please half sampaty.

Allah's piss  for you." In the bus now, silence

and private wars between purse and charity.

"Half ya broda, half sampaty on  me."

The conductor, scorning all etiquette

laughed loud, pitying country, not beggar

and swore: "God punish you, Lord Lugard,

na you bring this english come Nigeria!"

The white-and-yellow arm beckoned the bus,

a wild fury of horns startled it past

ferrying us beyond claims of charity

and of Lugard's shadow in the black smoke.

Ogaga Ifowodo

3 May 1997

The Day Too Bright

(A Ruler Sings To Himself)

The day too bright for my bloodshot eyes,

I crave the eternity of night.

All is well then, truest sound my lies.

The sun steals the shine from my shoulders,

dims my swords and stars to a dead light.

All is gloom then, when the sun smoulders.

Holding loaded guns and shooting blind,

dead to death, I see the victims' fright.

All is right then, taking all I find.

Oh such power as I felt that July,

took flaming Lagos, tanks won the fight.

All dressed the throne, blood hurled up the sky.

If any knows it's me: night is best

for treason's conclaves on duels of might.

All coups were blessed, darkest deeds the test.

They seize the light of day to gather

and rail against darkness and their plight.

All must rue the day, bow to power.

I can't tell the country on a map,

must be where it bleeds to match my sight?

All chained to the rock, trails to the trap.

The rock! Ibrahim feared an angry day,

built bunkers, a fortress in granite.

All cold as stone, frozen for the stay.

But the sun is stubborn, so am I.

To deny blood, I won't wash it white -

sunglasses on, I can brave the sky.

Ogaga Ifowodo

1 September 1996

Fela: In Memoriam

            I

He faded gently upon his curved horn

when death came for its borrowed pouch.

A song heavy with the burden of life's

loss, the hard grief of days and nights to come

bowed heads, made jelly of dancing feet.

To steel his heart against fear, he wore death

below his midriff and lived like one

to whom immortality had been granted.

His nimble fingers slowed on the keyboard,

his cheeks no longer ballooned into his horns

as death approached, grave like a debt-collector.

So he took refuge in boastful denial

in answer to the strain of his wheezing lungs.

He saw the dark shadow at his doorpost

and blowing his introit, faded upon his horn.

            II

He was born twice, the first time

he spied his earth, shunned his name

whose sound echoed a strange clime,

and returned for the rite to tame

the spirits he would vanquish.

When he was born again, fire

blazed in his eyes to furnish

Ogun's forge; none would retire

until pure steel had been cast

for his backbone. So he stood straight

in hurricanes, in thunderblast -

till death, nothing they could throw

at him would break his back. Nothing.

He walked forbidden streets, walked the row

of set traps and sprung them all. Lifting

up his eyes, he claimed for his art everything.

            III

He dipped into the boiling pot of suffering

and found the common factor of our sorrow.

He drank to bottom the ancestral well

of healing water. His speech emboldened

the expelled air of discontent to salute

hope fluttering on a tattered flag. A song,

his long drums had told him, can make a world,

can plant a dream and grow the tree of life.

The loud wail, the cry muted in a heart

dangling from frail threads threatened by fire,

the wound sharp as a knife - he turned them all

into the sound and fury of his songs.

He blew his horn, and regimes heard the rumble

of thundering feet. He chanted a note

and skeletons leapt out of locked closets.

            IV

He etched his name in the air

and breath doubled its vigour. He dissolved

into water, and tides gladdened fishermen.

He crucified himself on our outspread arms

and none could mock his agony.

He buried his splintered bones in our throats

and our speech evoked common griefs.

None could roll a stone over his body

to stop his dreaded spirit rising

to claim rebellious children and repressed wishes.

He lived according to his own gospels

and judged the righteousness of priests.

For his daring, he was given hell's worst tortures.

And after surviving the keenest flames

he could live by his own rules -

the only paradise worthy of a death.

            V

A horn full of ash arced the mournful air.

A simple casket of cane bore the priest

who knew the essence of riches, all fair

claims to glory; who knew what great feast

a simple supper can be where the soul,

not greed, is fed. Steeped in wealth, he joyed

in his plain clothes, happy in the shoal

of gold hemmed into the seam. Pretenders

and clowns may yet clutch with leprous fingers

at the sealed gourd of revealed self:

how shall they grasp it with awkward stumps?

Let the horn in the heir's mouth hymn the shelf

of shattered dreams with the song of parting.

And as earth, impatient, widens its jaws

to receive a royal guest, let weeping

eyes behold sun and moon mating, and the awe.

                        VI

At heavensgate, they hauled his book of sins

before him, sought to bar him from his seat.

One blast of his horn brought down the walls.

The choir of praise, tongue-tied, lost its voice.

With a tongue of fire, he shall change the hymn.

Oh music man, with a foot on the rock

of your rusty place of birth, trumpet

irreverence in heaven, and rouse a bored band

to rebellion. Cast him down, dear God,

into our waiting arms. We long for one

not born of a virgin, not spawned from divine

sperm, but one who, cast in mere clay, rejoiced

in the ordained vanities of his being.

From the mouth of him with nothing to gain

may we take the oath of things unknowable.

Ogaga Ifowodo

29 August, 1997

Jeepers Creepers

(after Louis 'Satchmo' Armstrong)

And your father has said

in plain and pointed terms:

what do you say for a fellow

that leaves his wig and bib to brown

in a locked closet, and droopy-

eyed, claims joy in a fool's stutter?

And I have not answered,

homebound in poetry's spell

outbound to coffee-rooms

where we meet and measure

the poets in spoons and cups,

I have not, dear, answered

when your eyes light on me!

He threatens now, you say,

the wrath and the fire

of a raving father fearing

entrapment by shapeless fancy,

Oh, he swears disinheritance

if you will play the silly girl.

And I have not answered,

not caring, as you know,

what weathermen and what

goldsmiths say bright days and

happiness must live by,

I have not, dear, answered

when thus your eyes turn pearls!

And in my half-lit room

where light from two stones

etches adoration

for things immeasurable

in gold weights or dollars,

I comb beauty's known shrines

And not finding the origin

of the sun and your eyes, I shout:

Oh eyes giving me the jeepers

Oh heart that hews out life's creepers

rejoicing in a bird's twitters,

where, just where, did she get those eyes?

Ogaga Ifowodo

9 May 1997

My Prison Bed

The first night gave signs of what was to come.

A reed mat on bare concrete, sand shovelled

in by foot from a beachy frontage, showed

what little room for comfort between flesh

and floor. Elbow for pillow, I smuggled

a dream of liberty into the small

fraction of night for which a trained army

of mosquitoes was ready to spill blood.

At dawn, five fingers pressed on the right cheek

branded me with ill-presumed tribal marks,

leaving me wondering why, seeing that Akin

with the right to the marks had a clean cheek.

You could say the first night was glorious, gave

a false picture, if spent in an office

whose chairs were made to vacate their tables; yes,

you could say we merely slept on duty!

No pampering place awaited us where we

were driven the second night. Stripped

now of all belongings but sleeping clothes,

the jailer's "Not exactly like your bed

at home", aimed at soothing two forlorn nights

in a row, mocked with uncommon cruelty,

the unhappy end of a journey home.

The worked steel barrier clanged, clicked shut its huge

and black padlock of Chinese make, shaking

the fog of tiredness out of our heads.

The room was, admittedly, large, nothing

close to the pride-of-place cell of prison

notes. And there were windows, telling clearly

that breathing was no offence. A sofa

nearing complete collapse, the bare steel props

of a giant close-circuit monitor,

testified to a once-furnished room, just

as the broken down air-conditioner,

the boarded space for another, and peeled

stays of carpet, described the conversion

from room to cell. We found our beddings - six

square pieces of foam, which could have been

cushions in happier days, and another

one, longer but thinner, and too narrow

for two. I made bed with it, a cushion

gained as I put it where no pressed bottom

could fart on it. Exhaustion dropped me down

to sleep, only to be sprung to my feet

in an instant by the foul smell of the

pillow. I moved beneath the flourescent

to examine the beddings with wakeful

calm, having perished the thought of sniffing

the entire bed. Under the light, they seemed

a salvage of the dung-heap, drenched and dried

under rain and sun, spat and pissed upon

to suit them to prisoners and their needs.

One such prisoner, I presume, startled

out of a wet dream, sprayed his vital fluids

to draw lines and ringed blotches on the foam.

Any sleep this night or the nights to come

lay in this bed or bare concrete without

a mat. I turned the foam, beat and brushed it

with a broom, turned also the foul pillow

and made peace with the smells of sleep in prison.

Ogaga Ifowodo

4 December 1997

Unmarked Hours Beat their Hands Against the Wall

Unmarked hours beat their hands against the wall

grieve for wings plunged in a waterfall.

Outside the window, a woman's shoulders

quake in tribute to a scene of soldiers:

teeth, fragments of flesh in warm blood painted

the picture she sees of those that fainted.

A single call to prayer, amplified

to all of Sin Town, brings mortified

legions to banal rites of righteousness.

As the minister swears his piousness

birds blessed with greater freedom flee our skies

abandoning us to death and muted cries.

Philosophies of suffering dress the walls

of this cell, make the fate of dead seagulls

happier than of failed hearts that bled and wept:

"If men were God!"  that mocked the cliff and leapt,

crying out their grief: "Let Nigeria end now!"

No one will inquire who, why or how,

an old or new decree has sanctified

all wrongs in duty personified.

Unmarked days quench their suns, black into nights

and dreams enact weighted hearts in free flights.

Ogaga Ifowodo

November 1997

As In Athens

Under the old tree - ancient, having drunk

the earth's dew before I groped for her breast -

they sit over tobacco and rude gin.

At the waist of the tree, where gods have their mouth

present offerings slobber down over the old,

freshen the browned blood of yester-tributes.

A breeze combs the green hair of coconut,

orange and mango trees hedging the yard

with the scent of the sea, combs, too, grey hairs.

With a warm heart and a cold eye on all

that passed and passes between earth and sky,

that could dwell in the air, land or water,

white beards read the mist of ages past

and present. And begins poetry and proverbs.

Under the big old tree. As in Athens.

Ogaga Ifowodo

10 February, 1998

(From Madiba, my second collection).