Requiem: 5 by Wole Soyinka

Requiem: 5

I shall sit often on the knoll
And watch the grafting.
This dismembered limb must come
Some day
To sad fruition.
I shall weep dryly on the stone
That marks the gravehead silence of
A tamed resolve.
I shall sit often on the knoll
Till longings crumble too.
O I have felt the termite nuzzle
White entrail
And fine ants wither
In the mind's unthreaded maze.
Then may you frolic where the head
Lies shaven, inherit all,
Death-watches, cut your beetled capers
On loam-matted hairs. I know this
Weed-usurped knoll.
The graveyard now
Was nursery to her fears.

Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka is one the most honoured African poets. He is a playwright, poet, lecturer and an activist. He was awarded the Nobel prize in Literature in 1986 being the African to be so honoured. Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July, 1934.

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A Proud Old Man by Citambi Zulu

A Proud Old Man

They say they are healthier
than me,
Though they can't walk to the
end of a mile
At their age I walked forty at night
to wage battle at dawn
They think they are healthier than me
If their socks get wet they
catch cold,
When my sockless feet got wet,
I never sneezed,
But they still think they are
healthier than me
On a soft mattress over a spring
bed
They still have to take a sleeping
pill
But I, with reeds cutting into my
ribs
My head resting on a piece of
wood,
I sleep like a baby and snore

They blow their noses and they
pocket the stuff.
“That is hygenic” so they will
say.
I blow into the fire, they say
“it's barbaric”
If a dear one dies, I weep without
shame
And if someone jokes I laugh with
all my heart
They stiffle a tear as if crying is
something wrong.
No wonder they need psychiarists!

They think they have more power of will
than me
Our women were scarcely covered in the
days of yore,
But adultery was a thing
unknown.
Today they go wild on seeing a slip
On a hanger!
When I have more than one legitimate
wife
They tell me hell is my destination.
But when they have one and countless
mistresses
They pride themselves in cheating
the world.
Nay, let them learn to be honest first
themselves
Before they persuade me to change my ways.

Citambi Zulu

Whole Fragments by Jumoke Verissimo

Whole Fragments
For Labyrinths

On this deluge of sparseness
have my tendrils split the scales of their twining
far-far, into a distance unforeseen in the mind of mystics.

I have sampled learning from these labyrinths' secret; preserved,
drizzles of musings resisting
the heats of collective amnesia.

What if he had rained more pieces of magic sapphire?
that Okigbo
that heritage of an unborn.

Now I pore into that least of his less
discourses of all those,
I-read-him, I-read-what-looks-like-him,
I-knew-who-knew-him, I-knew-what-read-like-him.

Words of wishes have gathered greatness
into a will to swindle time,
or break wind one that carries its smell into a trillion myth
in memory of a memory that stays a memory

In yearnings I hear Silence

driving ignorance into a compulsion of assumptions
what if
renders itself an anthem, that torments our desires.

I pray and watch for Distances

But Heavensgate is a fiction when our longings are unfulfilled
how can
is the incomprehensiveness we welded a man's worth with.

I wait to break these Limits

If only I could trail this Path of Thunder

Jumoke Verissimo

Jumoke Verissimo is a Nigerian poet and writer. Her first book, I Am Memory, has won some literary awards in Nigeria. Some of her poems are in translation in Italian, Norwegian , French, Japanese, Chinese, and Macedonian. She was born on 26 December, 1979

Okigbo: Beyond the Riddle of Knowing by James Tar Tsaaior

Okigbo: Beyond the Riddle of Knowing

I know you. Without knowing you.
        The cotyledons of your poetic voice
Tore through the crust of humanity's conscience
        And conquered time and space
Before the seminal thought that incarnated me
        Traveled to the waiting ovary. My foetus.

I know you. Yet I do not know you.
        We met. During your famed tryst
With the goddess of poetry in your filial devotion
        At Mother Idoto's watery shrine.
Since, your poetic rites have held me hostage
        And sojourned in my restless, wrestling mind.

The large testaments you distilled
        With the tong of your leavened tongue;
The anvil and sledgehammer of your circumcised mind
        Have moulded nubile images in the caverns
Of our serrated, wounded and whimpering memories.
        But alas. You hugged the portentous leopard-skin
War drums and followed the path of thunder
        And embraced the streaks of lightning
A votive sacrifice to an unknown and unknowable
        Greedy god that has refused to be immolated.

You still are the burden of our creaking boulder
        Town crier, still announcing the adolescent dawn
Like the muezzin-cockerel. You still proclaim, prophet
        In apocalyptic accents the crime of the stolen dream.

Now, I know you. Beyond the riddle of knowing.
Your haunting metaphors.
Your seductive similes.
Your pregnant tropes.
Eternal graffiti etched
On the nudity of a textured lives.

James Tar Tsaaior

James Tsaaior is an Associate Professor, is the chairman of the Mass Media and Writing Department, School of Media and Communication, Pan- African University, Lagos, and Director of Academic Planning at the university, where he teaches creative writing and media studies. He was a visiting research fellow, Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge, UK.

The Tree by Christopher Okigbo

The Tree

THE ROOT has struck
A layer of rock;

The sap dries out in the stem
Upwards:
The blood dries out in the vein
Like sap

Christopher Okigbo

Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo was born in 1930. He was a Nigerian poet and he is today widely acknowledged as the outstanding postcolonial English - language African poet and one of the major modernist writers of the twentieth century. He died in 1967 while fighting for the independence of Biafra.

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