I feel her breath fanning my skin
In the rustlings of the cassava leaves
She sings a lonely melody
With the lost creatures of the night
And once and again
She comes with the rain...

iam tanganyika
i smell and fester with the smoke of african genesis
iam the beginning
kilimanjaro the anthill of rituals
iam the smile of africa...

Jos
She tickled us
Music rolled from sonorous winds
Eating from the gracious ambience
of our agreed tomorrows
We jiggled to the beats...

Custodian of our sovereignty
Canaries from Arabia
Where medicine men
Mutilate organs of our nationhood...

Ours is a land where labels make you better
A place where calibre is proved with brand
It helps to sport the odd logo or letter
It’s always favoured if it comes from jand
We never thought where all of this would lead
So busy were we paying obeisance to greed...

"Your undoing blooms like cancer"
Eroding at the core
Tugging at the seeds and razing the roots
Déraciné
"The axe forgets but the tree remembers..."

I am beautifully grown now; I will miss you: haunting,
lonely, focused, always near; I am no longer afraid
Of this life vanishing in front of my eyes –
I am still standing but you’re not here...

So doubt me not, you sons of anachronism
when I catch a moonbeam in my palms
when I lift up the sea waves to hide fresh dews
when I wrestle my quill from the whirlwind...

A new man peers across a ledge, pondering time, pondering faces;
and only a thicket of quiet responds, louder than a din of dank spaces.
It bobs, it weaves a yarn of times. It reeks of a kind of cold, sour breath,
of stories told again and again; a non-listening ear. A certain death.
It is silent here now, as memory plays roughly along the helm of choice...

Floods in the south battle to take homes,
Eruptions in the north emit foams,
Locust swarms burst from the east,
Gulping every green life and beast...

Midnight will approach amidst song and sound
as the darkness below becomes more feminine
and like Berbera herself speaks of her mystery
or her forbidden memory or her forgotten glory.
A tiny voice comes into you - Berbera's voice...

They come trooping out in song
Sprouting in figures and numbers
Saints white, yellow, red but black
To bath, splash, romance and canoodle
Where the locals cannot afford to drift...

Upon the rooted charm of amalgamation
Ikoro convokes confederal communion
As ordained by the log of memory
At the head of the waters...

And I heard the songbird’s call, sonorous
To birds of all seasons to converge
With their chorus of mellow harmonies
And their music of manifold melodies
Plural as the provenance of proverbs...

Behind these eyes full of sky are new
Melodies – listen. Are you listening?
I stick out like a blister – the surface like fire.
Darkness was trapped inside my mouth
Lost in the meantime in a world full of reaching...

it was a marriage of shells and hell
it was a marriage of strange expression
though blood and wine red
i was arab
and the plane was jewish...