Eyes Watch the Stars by Christopher Okigbo

Eyes open on the beach,

eyes open, of the prodigal;

upward to heaven shoot

where stars will fall from.

Which secret I have told into no ear;

into a dughole to hold,

not to drown with –

Which secret I have planted into beachsand;

now breaks

salt-white surf on the stones and me,

and lobsters and shells in

iodine smell —

maid of the salt-emptiness,

sophisticreamy, native,

whose secret I have covered up with beachsand.

Shadow of rain

over sunbeaten beach,

shadow of rain

over man with woman.

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.