PASTERNAK

The little dacha in Peredelkino

Has windows that close at sunset

Its walls, wily-wired, are ringed

With rosebuds, a rich orchard beyond the terrace

And shadows, eyes trained to smell treachery

Stalin’s dachas hang like rosettes

In the shrouded plains of Peredelkino

Caught in cobwebs of necropolitics

Dissolving into camp dusts

At night, sometimes through the barrels

Of a purge that leaves only paeans in its wake

The little dacha hangs precariously

By Stalin’s starched lapel

Slowly scribbling the intrigues of Dr Zhivago

Slowly weaving a cat’s cradle that will entrap you in its web

Slowly poking the peat of the Emperor’s soul

That winter

Moscow wore the garb of bad humour. Poet of isolation

You rejected the garland brought by Dr Zhivago, caught

In the mesh of its jagged history, haunted

By the souls of the dead-undead in the service of Revolution

A willowy sparing frame

By the garden gate, thinking

In ellipses, hoping the windows

Of your beloved dacha would close at sunset

And reopen in the morn, to a world

Free to mourn the dissolution of your will.

WAR AND PEACE

Kazumi Hachiya, an eighty-four-year old hibakusha

Minding a teashop in the south of Hiroshima

Lives in the oneiric wasteland of flying sorties

In the isolated mountains of graying times

Thin lights of death fall lightly across his face

*

A grim Reaper flying in North Waziristan

Drops a gift of peace on Eid day—

A payload on a family of six seeking parity

With Malala’s dream of a world free to love and learn.

The youngest lost a limb. And Nabila’s grandmother smiles to her death.

*

It’s Rosh Hashana in East Jerusalem:

The rabbi raises a toast to heaven, intones

Twelve canticles for peace.

But no shofar’s sound presaged the gunmen’s

Entry. Only blood and gore remain to testify

To these Christs’ purgation of the ancient synagogue.

*

The children of Chibok chose the Book of Life:

For those to whom books are an ossuary for the damned

All paths lead to misery, lead to the decapitation of a people’s

Free will. We ask for the path of safe return, for the children

Who left without farewell. They dance on their grave. Even the devil,

Fork-tongued, knows when duty calls.

Yomi Ogunsanya lives in Ibadan.