Overture by Christopher Okigbo

Before you, mother Idoto,

naked I stand,

before your watery presence,

a prodigal,

leaning on an oilbean,

lost in your legend…

Under your power wait I

on barefoot,

watchman for the watchword

at heavensgate;

out of the depths my cry

give ear and hearken.

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.