Limits II: For He Was A Shrub Among The Poplars by Christopher Okigbo

FOR HE WAS a shrub among the poplars

Needing more roots

More sap to grow to sunlight

Thirsting for sunlight

A low growth among the forest.

Into the soul

The selves extended their branches

Into the moments of each living hour

Feeling for audience

Straining thin among the echoes;

And out of the solitude

Voice and soul with selves unite

Riding the echoes

Horsemen of the apocalypse;

And crowned with one self

The name displays its foliage,

Hanging low

A green cloud above the forest.

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.