Collected Poems Read Online Free Page B

worked his homestead and his farmlands
    till evening came and laid him low
    with cruel foraging fever. Patient
    elders peering through the hut's dim
    light darkened more by smoke
    of smoldering fire under his bed
    steady-eyed at a guilt they had stalked
    across scrublands and seven rivers, a long-prepared
    hangman's loop in their hand
    quickly circled his neck
    as he died
    and the gods
    and ancestors
    were satisfied.
III
    They are strong and to be feared
    they make the mighty crash
    in ruin like
iroko's
fall
    at height of noon scattering
    nests and frantic birdsong
    in damped silence of deep
    undergrowth. Yet they are fooled
    as easily as children those deities
    their simple omnipotence
    drowsed by praise.
Lament of the Sacred Python
    I was there when lizards
    were ones and twos, child
    Of ancient river god Idemili. Painful
    Teardrops of Sky's first weeping
    Drew my spots. Sky-born
    I walked the earth with royal gait
    And crowds of human mourners
    Filing down funereal paths
    Across lengthening shadows
    Of the dead acknowledged my face
    In broken dirges of fear.
    But of late
    A wandering god pursued,
    It seems, by hideous things
    He did at home has come to us
    And pitched his tent here
    Beneath the people's holy tree
    And hoisted from its pinnacle
    A charlatan bell that calls
    Unknown monotones of revolts,
    Scandals, and false immunities.
    And I that none before could meet except
    In fear though I brought no terrors
    From creation's day of gifts I must now
    Turn on my track
    In dishonorable flight
    Where children stop their play
    To shriek in my ringing ears:
    Look out, python! Look out, python!
    Christians relish python flesh!
    And mighty god Idemili
    That once upheld from earth foundations
    Cloud banks of sky's endless waters
    Is betrayed in his shrine by empty men
    Suborned with the stranger's tawdry gifts
    And taken trussed up to the altar-shrine turned
    Slaughterhouse for the gory advent
    Feast of an errant cannibal god
    Tooth-filed to eat his fellows.
    And the sky recedes in
    Disgust; the orphan snake
    Abandoned weeps in the shadows.
Their Idiot Song
    These fellows, the old pagan
    said, surely are out of their mind—
    that old proudly impervious
    derelict skirted long ago by floodwaters
    of salvation: Behold the great
    and gory handiwork of Death displayed
    for all on dazzling sheets this
    hour of day its twin nostrils
    plugged firmly with stoppers of wool
    and they ask of him: Where
    is thy sting?
    Sing on, good fellows, sing
    on! Someday when it is you
    he decks out on his great
    iron bed with cotton wool
    for your breath, his massing odors
    mocking your pitiful makeshift defenses
    of face powder and township ladies' lascivious
    scent, these others roaming
    yet his roomy chicken coop will
    be singing and asking still
    but YOU by then
    no longer will be
    in doubt!
The Nigerian Census
    I will not mourn with you
    your lost populations, the silent columns
    of your fief erased
    from the king's book of numbers
    For in your house of stone
    by the great road
    you listened once to refugee voices
    at dawn telling of massacres and plagues
    in their land across seven rivers
    Like a hornbill in flight
    you tucked in your slippered feet
    from the threshold
    out of their beseeching gaze
    But pestilence farther
    than faraway tales of dawn
    had bought a seat in Ogun's reckless
    chariot and knocks by nightfall
    on your iron gate.
    Take heart oh chief; decimation
    by miscount, however grievous,
    is a happy retreat from bolder
    uses of the past. Take heart,
    for these scribal flourishes
    behind smudged entries, these
    trophied returns of clerical headhunters
    can never match the quiet flow
    of red blood.
    But if my grudging comfort fail,
    then take this long and even view to A.D. 2010
    when the word is due to go out again
    and—depending on which Caesar
    orders the count—new conurbations
    may sprout in today's wastelands,
    and thriving cities dissolve
    in sudden mirages
    and the ready-reckoners at court
    will calculate their gain
    and