Distances by Christopher Okigbo

(1964)

FROM FLESH into phantom on the horizontal stone I was the sole witness to my home coming…

Serene lights on the other balcony: redolent fountains bristling with signs –

But what does my divine rejoicing hold? A bowl of incense, a nest of fireflies?

I was the sole witness to my homecoming…

For in the inflorescence of the white chamber, a voice, from very far away, chanted, and the chamber descanted, the birthday of the earth, paddled me home through some dark labyrinth, from laughter to the dream.

Miner into my solitude, incarnate voice of the dream, you will go, with me as your chief acolyte, again into the ant-hill…

I was the sole witness to my homecoming…

Christopher Okigbo

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