Transition by Christopher Okigbo

Drop of dew on green bowl fostered

on leaf green bowl grows under the lamp

without flesh or colour;

under the lamp into stream of song, streamsong,

in flight into the infinite –

a blinded heron

thrown against the infinite –

where solitude

weaves her interminable mystery under the lamp.

The moonman has gone under the sea:

the singer has gone under the shade.

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.