Limits IV: An Image Insists by Christopher Okigbo

AN IMAGE insists

from the flag pole of the heart,

The image distracts

with the cruelty of the rose …

My lioness

(No shield is lead plate against you)

Wound me with your sea-weed face,

blinded like a strong-room.

Distances of your

armpit-fragrance

Turn chloroform,

enough for my patience –

When you have finished,

and done up my stitches,

Wake me near the altar,

& this poem will be finished.

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.