Fragments Out of the Deluge X: But at The Window by Christopher Okigbo

BUT at the window

Outside

at the window,

A shadow –

Listen. Listen again under the shadow…

Give me a spooknif, and shave my long beard …

The Sunbird sings again

From the LIMITS of the dream,

The Sunbird sings again

Where the caress does not reach,

of Guernica,

On whose canvas of blood,

The newsprint-slits of his tongue cling to glue…

& the cancelling out is complete.

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.