Sunday, 25 June 2023

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.
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