Collected Poems Read Online Free

garlanded at the city gate
    and escorted with royal drums
    to a stupendous festival
    of an amazed world.
    One day
    after the passage of a dark April storm
    ecstatic birds followed its furrows
    sowing songs of daybreak though the time
    was now past noon, their sparkling
    notes sprouting green incantations
    everywhere to free the world
    from harmattan death.
    But for me
    the celebration is make-believe;
    the clamorous change of season
    will darken the hills of Nsukka
    for an hour or two when it comes;
    no hurricane will hit my sky—
    and no song of deliverance.
Bull and Egret
    At seventy miles an hour
    one morning down the seesaw
    road to Nsukka I came
    upon a mighty bull
    in form and carriage
    so unlike Fulani cattle—
    gaunt, high-horned, triangular
    faced—that come in herded
    multitudes from dusty savannas
    to the north…. Heavy
    was he, solitary dark
    and taciturn, one of a tribe
    they say fate has chosen
    for slow extinction. At his heels
    paced his egret, intent
    praise-singer, pure white
    all neck, walking high
    stilts and yet no higher
    than his master's leg joint….
    Odd covetousness indeed would
    leave its boundless green estates
    for a spell of petty trespassing
    on perilous asphalt laid for me…. My
    frantic blast of iron voice
    shattered their stately march, then
    recoiled brutally to my heart
    as he gathered in hasty panic
    the heaviness of his hind
    quarters, so ungainly in his
    hurry, and flung it desperate
    beyond my monstrous
    reach. I should have felt unworthy then
    playing such pranks on the noble
    elder and watching his hallowed
    waist cloth came undone had not
    his singer fared so well…. Two
    quick hops, a flap of
    wings and he was
    safe posture intact on
    brown laterite…. I could not
    bear him playing so
    faithfully my faithless agility-man, my
    scrambler to safety, throat dilated
    still by remnant praises
    of his excellency high-headed
    in delusion marching now alone
    into death's ambush…. We were
    spared, the bull and I, in our separate follies….
    His routed sunrise procession
    no doubt would reform beyond the clamor
    of my passage and sprightly
    egret take up again
    his broken adulation
    of the bull, his everlasting
    prince, his giver-in-abundance
    of heavenly cattle ticks.
Lazarus
    We know the breathtaking
    joy of his sisters when the word
    spread: He is risen! But a
    man who has lived a full life
    will have others to
    reckon with beside his
    sisters. Certainly that keen-eyed
    assistant who has moved up
    to his table at the office, for
    him resurrection is an awful
    embarrassment…. The luckless
    people of Ogbaku knew its
    terrors that day the twin-headed
    evil strode their highway. It
    could not have been easy
    picking up again the blood-spattered
    clubs they had cast away; or to
    turn from the battered body
    of the barrister lying beside his
    battered limousine to finish off
    their own man, stirring now suddenly
    in wide-eyed resurrection…. How well
    they understood, those grim-faced
    villagers wielding their crimson
    weapons once more, how well
    they understood that at the hour
    of his rising their kinsman
    avenged in murder would turn
    away from them in obedience
    to other fraternities, would turn indeed
    their own accuser and in one
    breath obliterate their plea
    and justification! So they killed
    him a second time that day on the
    threshold of a promising resurrection.
Vultures
    In the grayness
    and drizzle of one despondent
    dawn unstirred by harbingers
    of sunbreak a vulture
    perching high on broken
    bone of a dead tree
    nestled close to his
    mate his smooth
    bashed-in head, a pebble
    on a stem rooted in
    a dump of gross
    feathers, inclined affectionately
    to hers. Yesterday they picked
    the eyes of a swollen
    corpse in a waterlogged
    trench and ate the
    things in its bowel. Full
    gorged they chose their roost
    keeping the hollowed remnant
    in easy range of cold
    telescopic eyes….
    Strange
    indeed how love in other
    ways so particular
    will pick a corner
    in that charnel