Fragments Out Of The Deluge VIII: But The Sunbird by Christopher Okigbo

BUT the Sunbird –

Listen under the oilbean shadows –

Repeats, repeats,

over the oilbean shadows …

A fleet of eagles

over the oilbean shadows

Holds the square

under curse of their rank breath.

Beaks of bronze, wings of

hard-tanned felt,

The eagles flow

over man mountains,

Steep walls of voices,

horizons;

The eagles furrow

dazzling over the voices

With wings like

combs in the wind’s hair

Out of the solitude,

The fleet,

out of the solitude,

Intangible

like the silk thread of the sunlight,

The eagles ride low,

resplendent… resplendent …

And small birds sing in shadows,

Wobbling under their bones.

So squatting,

A blind dog howls at his godmother –

YUNICE at the passageway,

Singing the moon to sleep over the hills,

YUNICE at the passageway –

Give him no chair, they say,

The crier of the dawn,

Riding with gods and the angry stars

Toward the great sunshine.

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.