Fragments Out Of The Deluge V: Upon An Empty Sarcophagus by Christopher Okigbo

UPON an empty sarcophagus

out of solid alabaster,

A branch of giant fennel,

on an empty sarcophagus …

Nothing suggests accident

where the beasts

Are finishing their rest:

Smoke of ultramarine and amber

Floating above the fields after

moonlit rains

From tree unto tree distils

the radiance of a king …

You might as well see the new branch

in ENKI;

And that is no new thing either …

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.