Tuesday Poem by Joel Benjamin Ntwatwa

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They Will Carry Me

One day
They’ll take me away,
Away,
On a rainy Saturday.

They’ll carry me away
Upon their shoulders in a small brown box;
Never been a heavy man anyway,
So they’ll carry with ease that day.

I will be neatly dressed
Litres of perfume upon my ironed face,
Eyes closed and unaware of the procession
I will be led away.

Lowered into a pit,
Tiled and clean, I hope it will be;
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes
Into oblivion, carried away.

_______

Joel Ntwatwa passed on the Feb  10 2018 at age 33 from complications of Sickle Cell Anaemia. Read his obituary here.

 

Tuesday Poem by Tonney Ibe

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RELEASE

Maybe our scars are different,
But we have both bled:
The inmost dwelling
A haunted house.
Scraped on the keel,
This body hikes on its heel
In search of the infamous hill,
Where peace burns eternally:
It is El Dorado!
My wounds are vales oozing
Steam, hot lava, and mild tremors;
My life, a festival for flies
To feed as I bleed
And brood, and break.
I have contemplated in the dark,
The devil’s deed
One time too many.
I saw heaven flaked in rum
Running from a crystal decanter,
A solemn wish to die drunk,
And stay dead until a waking.
So why cloak the gash
Dealt by life’s lash
Under checkered smiles?
Cry, Scream,
Burst at the seams!
Maybe our scars are different,
But pain is a universal brunt.
Yours I’ve carried before,
Mine you might feel sometime.
If only sleep slaked worries,
The monotonous honking of lorries
Would scurry into the distance.
If only the roadmap to clarity,
Were more than a dream in death,
It would all be for nought.
Mining the black dot
That is a lifelong commitment,
I am crying, screaming,
And bursting at the seams!
A new scar is underway.

Tuesday Poem by Chibuihe Obi

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after two swigs of absinthe, i yield myself to the philosophy of grief and memory 

 

for romeo oriogun 

 

i’m always lonely in the midst of tongues

keen to note how joy can also mean grief for the one

scanning a bottle of rum for sunlight

only to grope his way home in darkness

because grief    sometimes       is a lover’s tender palm

blinding tenderly

in a bar in kampala     two men lean into each other

unified in lust      both thirsty for one thing     a bristling  river

to drown in

i’ve learnt to observe these things

how a man’s body is both thirst and roiling ocean

how he can drown in a song or dismember desire

there’s a boy who goes to an inn to find his

father’s body in shots of fireballs

he falls to his knees each time

he sees a stranger’s feet floating in the

disco light

he knows how a stranger’s body could be

home sometimes

a temporary tomb that swallows memory

at dawn         he returns to the same

house by the sea           where his father’s ghosts pours back

into coats and become waves thirsty for home

i know to breath is to number the dead         to mourn

in measured sequence

but how come memory clings this

tight to air like a flotsam

returning to shore again and again

every season of tide

Tuesday Poem Special by Emmanuel Iduma

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I have tried to be
a magician
crossing seven seas
and oceans,
having reputed talisman
from India and Bahrain:
but I am here
in this room I made
twenty years before.

I took upon the thought
of visiting the moon during
my honeymoon,
placing a self-made flag
and claiming to my sweetheart
how wonderful it is:
but I have never left
or felt another existence
except the feather on this wall.

It is not presumptuous to think
that I could write a masterpiece,
along glorious shelves my name
to be found, to speak as though
I held a vial that ran the world,
and move around countries
with ease: but this typewriter
placed on this table last century
has grown clumsy, with friction.

To think I have become this,
a self-cursed man, riding terribly
in mistakes of final years,
to think I can watch the ocean
fading, and be void of tears,
to think I have no finger to hold
a pen; to think all these
and remain sane, alive,
I am without words and grateful.

I​’​ll look no further
I​’​ve found a place.

​
First published in “The Economy of Sound” Saraba Magazine’s first poetry chapbook, 2009.

Tuesday Poem by Umar Abubakar Sidi

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Things Poets Do

Bad poets do not see poetry as light

or the illuminated incandescence of light

 

Bad poets see poetry as the giant fork

which rakes through the flesh of hearts

 

Bad poets perceive poetry as the blackness of black

the invisible tube, the darkened cave of enlightened ghosts

 

Bad poets define poetry as the aesthetic amalgamation of words to evoke a waterfall of bliss

 

Bad poets hear poetry in the cries of strangulated beasts, the whispers of djinns and the cries of cats possessed by the demon of war

 

Bad poets do not know time as the linear progression in space

or the cyclical rotation of orbs along tailored paths

 

Time to Bad poets is the complete summation of consciousness and the components of sight

 

Bad poets inscribe poems in golden ink and hang them as mua’allaqats on the Kaaba of Words

 

Bad poets investigate poems not with pen, paper, ink and a critical mind but with scalpels, lyrical rakes, telescopes and a magnifying glass from the Madhouse of Life

 

Bad poets sing songs in synchrony to the invisible voices in the sky and the transparent spirits of night

 

Bad poets do not swallow prescribed pills, they take down Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism and shred all to powdered bits

 

Bad poets sail across the ocean of sands to capture the most glorious sunset which occurs only on the seventh day of Yun

 

Bad poets are navigators of soul; they climb minuscule centaurs and canter gently through veins, arteries and the capillaries of consciousness

 

Bad poets pluck out their eyes at night and inscribe blind lyrics ‘about the absolute necessity of dark angles of thought’ on the invisible tablets swinging in the sky

 

Bad poets do not aspire to poetry or to the architectural arrangement of words and sounds

 

Bad poets aspire to the 7th region of bliss, the original source of language, the inscrutable tablet where the sacred words: kun fa ya kun manifest

 

Bad poets are the accursed emperors of the Empire of Words, they include; the Poet of the Waters of the Sky, the Poet of Light and Blood and down here in our climes, the Poet of the Epiphanies, the Mad Poet of Kilifi and the Poet of the Clinical Blues

 

Bad poets do not write poems, they suspend their gigantic hearts on pins, soak them in the kerosene of love and set them ablaze, then they hold the ultimate mirror of life ­& on its plains, they sketch the holy image of love, glowing in flames

 

Bad poets say ‘poems do not end; every poem is a floating orb in the invisible elliptical orbit of poetic continuum’, and with this I say: Thank you dear reader, for reading the unreadable things poets do.

Tuesday Poem by Akin Akinwumi

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Five Haikus

1.
I put down the year
Like a mad dog. Once welcomed,
It ran off with me.

2.
Standing at the door,
Unannounced and hat in hand,
Is the beginning.

3.
Now is the right time
To turn a new leaf and ink
The feathers of thought.

4.
Slowly becoming
Me, that which I fear and flee,
I end up myself.

5.
Seed my days with life;
Of morns and dews and chirps and
Roads worth sojourning.

A Poem by Yemi Soneye: Christmas Special

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Christmas on a Street

A girl holds herself out of the window
like a doll to be tossed

and no one cares if
she throws it all down.

Other girls in the room distant
as cold ashes from fire

taken by the filigreeing
of their nails for the service

and hiding of their faces
behind beauty and eyeliners.

A fireman.
It’s dark in his world

he’s been wracked by the hours
and is trudging to bed.

But still a Merry Christmas
he hurls up

to stagger
back into the room

the girl
and shut the window.

___________

Happy Holidays, Readers.

Tuesday Poem

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After Making Love

After making love
we hear footsteps,
familiar thuds;
bodies entwined,
souls departing down the hall.

The bed is a battle floor,
children spoils of the war.
There is something romantic about a lover’s snore,
but who goes to sleep
while strangers guard their door?

So we hire a goldsmith,
take the lavish gold
out of the empty bags
and weigh the silver in the balance;
we make idols.

In dreams
we bare the legs
uncover the thighs,
pass over the river,
but there is no one to answer when we call.

She left
and Eden became a wilderness,
no tree to be desired to make one wise,
we die to make old friends,
we kill to make peace.

Light so bright,
it becomes darkness
the diviners have been made mad.
We drank of the wine,
we drank from the prophet’s skull.

Make crowns of thorns, Jesus will die twice.
Lay her, that perfect sacrifice
at the altar of fame.
We’ll make God in our own image,
we want him to change, we want him to feel our shame.

Tuesday Poem by Ayomide Owoyemi

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HOPE

Wherever the heart seeks is home.
Back home we had no hope,
Hope, we hear, lived in a faraway land,
So from Agadez
we journey on the backs of speeding 4x4s,
across desert sands.

In the quest for hope,
Perservance is all we can muster,
Days cross the places where
Hope turns to parched bones,
And green grass to sinking sand,
Hotter days becomes colder nights
Resolve breathes in that 4×4 engine.

Here is Tripoli,
Gateway to hopes ferried on rafts,
A maze of trials,
And snaring slavers,
Laid bare by the despots,
Hope buds in its chaos
Here we traverse purgatorio’s 2nd cycle,
Till we hand out the coin
And moor for Italy,
Tonight.

These coasts bid bye to shuffling feet,
Hurrying from doom to freedom,
Elephants from below the Sahara,
Hopes packed to the rafters,
Crossing to greener pastures.
Claimed first by the sea,
They bloomed as white roses,
Hope now lies
under Salerno

Tuesday Poem by Efe Ogufere

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DANCING
i
this woman’s body is not a home,
beautiful broken things do not make a home.
it is an abandoned house
around the corner,
walk too briskly
and you’d miss it.

ii
Mother neatly folds sobs
between her wrappers
carefully placing them in a box,
sighs and despondent smiles,
she walks out and dares a lion to bare his teeth.
she forgot she was a pacifist.

iii
the crunch of breaking bones,
a marriage of fists does not
end in a dance of naked flesh.

her terse voice orders me
back to sleep
back to denial
then her tired, sad smile
and she whispers,
back to bed Jethro,
your father and I are just dancing