Saturday, 28 November 2015

Nigerian Girl with Calabash by Viola Allo

Nigerian Girl with Calabash

She sells milk to thirsty travelers,
wraps her spine slow on the shoulder of the road
calabash on head, broad woody bowl perched on
circular twist of dyed cotton cloth,
her body a thread beneath it.
Her thick braids say she is ethnic Fulani.
Weighted with oil, they graze the sides
of her bamboo neck, ropes that set
the bells of her red-bead, gold earrings
swaying in the steeple of her face.
Her calabash contains her offering
to the busy car park, a place of fair transactions:
a glass of milk for a few naira, for less
than the alms one might freely part with on a Sunday.
She holds herself straight on the curved arm of the road,
soothes what she can of a bounty of human need,
shelters her calabash with a flat roof of
woven straw. A point of light travels through
this palm-fiber roof to excite the lake of viscous white
trapped inside. But there is no splash of milk. No,
not like July monochrome raindrops when they slosh
in monsoon buckets that travel heavy and tilt
over Africa. Her mother must have said:
Careful, as you carry this.
As if it were a crown, slender arms of mother
and daughter lifted up and steadied the gourd,
hours ago. And when their arms fell, silver bracelets
tinkled like wind chimes, then settled loosely
on narrow wrists, encircled the warmth pulsing there.
Now, against an unguarded symphony of cars,
passengers, voices of men and machines that try to
but cannot blend, she lowers her calabash,
brings herself to the ground to uncover it. Braids,
earrings, bracelets in motion, she squats and
enters the sound that the road brings.
Some people say that Africans have been left
behind, as if time selects the ones it catches up
and pulls to the ground. But time leaves no one
behind, not even a girl with a calabash. Time
swallows her stillness like a thirsty traveler
on the road from Ibadan to Kaduna.

Viola Allo

Viola Allo is a Cameroonian-born poet based in the United States. Raised in Cameroon by her Cameroonian father and American mother. In 2010, Viola received an Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation fellowship to attend the UC Davis Tomales Bay Workshops. In 2011, her poem "Nigerian Girl with Calabash" was published in US Poet Laureate Kay Ryan's community college poetry anthology, Poetry for the Mind's Joy.

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Letter to Soyinka by Afam Akeh

Letter to Soyinka

The children of this land are old
Their eyes are fixed on maps in place of land
Their feet must learn to follow
Distant contours traced by alien minds
Their present sense has faded into past.

(Wole Soyinka Samarkand and Other Markets
I Have Known, 2002)

I am that brood of brats you haunt in verse.
Some feet I know may never walk home.

They are alien to any land.
Memory is not their friend.

They have lived many lives,
are too many lies from childhood.

I am with my fellows less convinced.
I have shit. And I dump.

I dump in poems. I dump on people.
I dream of home and dump.

The world I walk is not your world.
It has neither clarity nor empathy.

I don't attach. I detach. I am old at faking love.
Not good to be this dry, without oil,

moisture, the old validations, lost in loss
and its foggy sense of years.

Born to a land at war with its young
I fled and still flee.

Not that I quit: I reclaim my stolen life.
Not that I fall, but I wrestle with history.

And you know, you already do.
You too have lived this dark.

Your faithfulness unsettles me,
this sacred trust, your love of land,

all your roads leading home, the homecomings
never far from the departures.

What potion has your name on it?
Is it the weather or women,

the gods that failed,
Ogun the capricious, your avatar?

Is there divorce from a love
that would make and also break?

What talent in your beard is counsel
for my fellows this day of doubt?

For this much is our “present sense”:
Love changed and we changed with it.

We who were never suckled,
we play possum, play chameleon,

play dirty, and dump: refuge hunters,
parallel lives with undead pasts,

breeding abroad unsettled by home.
Distant. Defiant. Divided.

If we end as we have lived
we will be buried away from you.

Afam Akeh

Afam Akeh is a Nigerian writer. A graduate of the University of Ibadan. His works have won awards including the 2nd prize in the BBC Arts for Africa Competition back in 1988.

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Changamire by Batsirai Chigama

Changamire

There were things familiar, brisk,
nonchalant conversations, neon fabrics
of this place that once was home.
He used to sit under the bougainvillea
behind my mother’s kitchen for his afternoon tea,
suit and tie clad knitting earthly stories of when he was a boy
and I not yet born.  Chitoto was the famous one
who thought himself a great fighter, he would begin
Among other anecdotes to whoever cared to listen
Knobkerrie resting on his lap taking the space I
should have sat.   I have returned home,
The bougainvillea is gone
It’s pink petals unfolding invasive memory
Familiar words roll off my tongue smoothly now
No one will ever lisp-mimic me like he used to
Meaning departs, fails to connect.
Shimmering blue, yellow ties spin before my eyes, yet
I don’t remember how the tobacco from his pipe smelt;
my grandfather...he loved his afternoon tea that is all I remember

Batsirai Chigama

Batsirai Chigama is an erudite Zimbabwean poetess. Her poems have been commanding audience all over African continent.

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Young Africa's Plea by Dennis Osadebay

Young Africa's Plea

Don’t preserve my customs
As some fine curious
To suit some white historian’s tastes.
There’s nothing artificial
That beats the natural way
In culture and ideals of life.
Let me play with the whiteman’s ways
Let me work with the blackman’s brains
Let my affairs themselves sort out.
Then in sweet rebirth
I’ll rise a better man
Not ashamed to face the world.
Those who doubt my talents
In secret fear my strength
They know I am no less a man.
Let them bury their prejudice,
Let them show their noble sides,
Let me have untrammelled growth,
My friends will never know regret
And I, I never once forget

Dennis Osadebay

Dennis Chukude Osadebay (29 June 1911—26 December 1994) was a Nigerian politician, poet, journalist and former premier of the now defunct Mid-Western Region of Nigeria, which now comprises Edo and Delta State. He was one of the pioneering Nigerian poets who wrote in English.

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A Millenial Meditation (excerpt) by Tijan M. Sallah

A Millenial Meditation

The capitalists of death
Never think they will die.
So is their perennial illusion, the Death Illusion.
I do not blame them for death is a coward.
For capitalists, mortality is for others; not for them.
Money will flow, and the body can be revamped;
Spare parts are many, the body will adjust.
Money will flow, and may be even buy immortality.
But, but… are they not mistaken?

Tijan M. Sallah

Tijan M. Sallah is a Gambian poet, short story writer, biographer and economist at the World Bank.

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Night Rain by J.P. Clark

Night Rain

What time of night it is
I do not know
Except that like some fish
Doped out of the deep
I have bobbed up bellywise
From stream of sleep
And no cocks crow.
It is drumming hard here
And I suppose everywhere
Droning with insistent ardour upon
Our roof thatch and shed
And thro' sheaves slit open
To lightning and rafters
I cannot quite make out overhead
Great water drops are dribbling
Falling like orange or mango
Fruits showered forth in the wind
Or perhaps I should say so
Much like beads I could in prayer tell
Them on string as they break
In wooden bowls and earthenware
Mother is busy now deploying
About our roomlet and floor.
Although it is so dark
I know her practiced step as
She moves her bins, bags and vats
Out of the run of water
That like ants gain possession
Of the floor. Do not tremble then
But turns, brothers, turn upon your side
Of the loosening mats
To where the others lie.
We have drunk tonight of a spell
Deeper than the owl's or hat's
That wet of wings may not fly
Bedraggled up on the iroko, they stand
Emptied of hearts, and
Therefore will not stir, no, not
Even at dawn for then
They must scurry in to hide.
So let us roll over on our back
And again roll to the beat
Of drumming all over the land
And under its ample soothing hand
Joined to that of the sea
We will settle to sleep of the innocent and free.

J.P. Clark

John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo was born on 6th April,1935. He is a Nigerian poet and playwright. He has written and published numerous poems and plays, some of his most popular works are Abiku (poetry) and Song of a Goat (a play).

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Sunday, 8 November 2015

The Cry of the Bird by Nimrod Bena Djangrang

The Cry of the Bird
(for Daniel Bourdanné)

I wanted to be overcome with silence

I abandoned the woman I love

I closed myself to the bird of hope

That invited me to climb the branches

Of the tree, my double

I created havoc in the space of my garden

I opened up my lands

I found the air that circulates between the
panes

Pleasant. I was happy

To be my life’s witch doctor

When the evening rolled out its ghosts

The bird in me awoke again

Its cry spread anguish

In the heart of my kingdom.

Nimrod Bena Djangrang

Nimrod Bena Djangrang was born in Koyom, in the south of Chad in 1950. Originally a teacher of French, history, geography and philosophy in Chad and the Ivory Coast, Nimrod has published poems and short stories in various periodicals such as Cargo , Mâche- Laurier and Revue Noire . Translations from French into English by Patrick Williamson

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Ambassadors of poverty by Philip O.C. Umeh

Ambassadors of poverty

Ambassadors of poverty are
The corrupt masters of the economy
With their head abroad
And anus at home
Patriots in reverse order
Determined merchants of loots
Who boost the economy of their colonial order
To impoverish brothers and sisters at home

Ambassadors of poverty are
The saviours of the people
Office loafers in the guise of workers
Barons of incompetence
With kleptomaniac fingers
And suckling filaments
Position occupants and enemies of service
Locked in the corrosive war of corruption
With their people’s treasury
And killing their future

Ambassadors of poverty are
The dubious sit tight patriots
Frustrating the corporate will of their followers
The beleaguered,hungry and famished owners of the land
People priced out of their conscience and power
Incapacitated by destitution
Unable to withstand the temptation
Of crispy mints and food aroma

Ambassadors of poverty are
The political elites
In air conditioned chambers
And exotic cars
With tearful stories of rip offs
Tucked away from
Their impoverish constituencies
Lying prostrate
With death traps for roads
Mud for water
Candle for light
Underneath trees as schools
Rat for protein
Fasting as food
And alibi as governance

Ambassadors of poverty are
The rancorous elites In battle of supremacy
For the control of power
And their people’s wealth
Mowing down their own
With white man’s machine
Oiled by the prosperity of black patronage
Counterpoised by deprivations
As the corpses of their able-bodied men
Women and children lie un-mourn
In shallow graves
In their fallow farmlands
Long abandoned

Ambassadors of poverty are
The round trippers
The elusive importers
Of unseen goods and services
Sand inclusive
Who trip the economy down
By tricking form M
For harvest of dollars as import
When their people see neither money nor food

Ambassadors of poverty are
The able-bodied men on the street
Without motives,without vision,without mission
Men fit for the farm
But glued to the city
Hungry and desperate
Constituting willing tools in the hands
Of political overlords
For mission of vendetta
Against political foes
In their fight for power

Ambassadors of poverty are
Those who actions and inactions
Reduce their people’s expectation to nothingness
Those who antecedents
Have lost the spark to inspire
While their people lie in surrender
Having been defeated by poverty

Ambassadors of poverty are
All of us whose in-actions
Steal our collective joy
Because of what we should do
Which we never do
As we bargain away
Our conscience in the market place
Under the weight of poverty
To assuage our hunger
And our master’s will.

Philip O.C. Umeh

Philip O.C. Umeh is a Nigerian poet. He studied English at the University of Lagos. He taught English at the Government College, Umuahia where he was senior English Master until 1978. From 1978 he was Editorial Director at the Publishing House, Nelsons, and from Publishing, he joined the civil service, and retired from public service as the Federal Director of National Productivity.

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The Tree by Christopher Okigbo

The Tree

THE ROOT has struck
A layer of rock;

The sap dries out in the stem
Upwards:
The blood dries out in the vein
Like sap

Christopher Okigbo

Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo was born in 1930. He was a Nigerian poet and he is today widely acknowledged as the outstanding postcolonial English - language African poet and one of the major modernist writers of the twentieth century. He died in 1967 while fighting for the independence of Biafra.

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Black Woman by Leopold Sedar Senghor

Black Woman

Naked woman, black woman

Clothed with your colour which is life, with your form
which is beauty!

In your shadow I have grown up; the gentleness of your
hands was laid over my eyes.

And now, high up on the sun-baked pass, at the heart
of summer, at the heart of noon, I come upon you, my
Promised Land,

And your beauty strikes me to the heart like the flash of
an eagle.

Naked woman, dark woman

Firm-fleshed ripe fruit, sombre raptures of black wine,
mouth making lyrical my mouth

Savannah stretching to clear horizons, savannah
shuddering beneath the East Wind's eager caresses

Carved tom-tom, taut tom-tom, muttering under the
Conqueror's fingers
Your solemn contralto voice is the spiritual song of the
Beloved.

Naked woman, dark woman

Oil that no breath ruffles, calm oil on the athlete's
flanks, on the flanks of the Princes of Mali
Gazelle limbed in Paradise, pearls are stars on the night
of your skin

Delights of the mind, the glinting of red gold against
your watered skin

Under the shadow of your hair, my care is lightened by
the neighbouring suns of your eyes.

Naked woman, black woman,
I sing your beauty that passes, the form that I fix in the
Eternal,

Before jealous fate turn you to ashes to feed the roots of life.

Leopold Sedar Senghor

Léopold Sédar Senghor was a Senegalese Negritude poet and politician. He was the first president of Senegal. Senghor was born on 9th October 1906 in Joal , French West Africa (present-day Senegal) and died on 20th December 2001 in Verson , France.

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The Land of Unease by Niyi Osundare

The Land of Unease The land never knows peace Where a few have too much And many none at all. The yam of this world Is enough for all mouths...