Tears and the Muse...and Grey Rooms

 An abundance of grey

wears the prisoner?s world to rags.

 -Ogaga Ifowodo

When the Black Ravens regurgitated Osip

and discarded him in Voronezh

like poisoned cud from the belly of a goat

Adorned the head of his Black Earth

with a crown of cactus,

acupuncture for his weary soles

Planted needles

in the valley of Nadezhda?s bosom

where his head hatched plumules in repose

Denied him

a needle-eye?s view of the sea

and bound him in a grey room where time

Wearing a wooden mask

shoved him off a spectator?s seat

at Aurora?s theatre

Fear and the Muse

unbound the bounds

so witnessed Akhmatova

But when his swelled the

?heaped hills of human heads?

congealed in Siberia

Fear and the Muse voyaged to Greece

found Panagoulis in another grey room

and midwifed verses etched in the poet?s blood

In Malawi they found undisappearable Mapanje

dining with chameleons and gods in his grey room

and taught him to skip without ropes

Then, Nigeria. The grey room was silent, empty

a dangling noose, an extinct pipe was all they found

fear, now useless, fizzled. Tears were all the Muse had left.

From ?The Way farer and Other Poems?

Johannesburg

For Harry Garuba

Black hands cast the first stone

To welcome the Black immigrant?s skull

Black tongues spill the first venom

To wash the Black immigrant?s face

Pray who can fathom the depths to which

A man?s head will accompany his legs?

The wayfarer?s head accompanied his legs

To the land of Ulysses

They called him Barbaroi

The irritant with crude ways

The Nigerian?s head accompanies his legs

To the kraal of Mandela

They call him Makwerekwere

The irritant with a crude tongue

Black hands cast the first stone

Crushing the skull of past beneficence

Black hands sow thorns

On paths Mandela trod cap in hand

Returning always with sackloads of petrodollars

Black mouths deride the land

Where the pain of Mbeki?s exile

Received the balm of hospitality

Like Ovid at Tomi

Black hands cast the first stone

Black tongues spill the first venom

Spreading the red carpet

For collective amnesia