Passion Flower by Christopher Okigbo

And the flower weeps

unbruised,

Lacrimae Christi,

For him who was silenced;

whose advent

dumb bells in the dim light celebrate

with wine song:

Messiah will come again,

After the argument in heaven;

Messiah will come again,

Lumen mundi…

Fingers of penitence

bring

to a palm grove

vegetable offering

with five

fingers of chalk.

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.