Tag Archive for: Contemporary African poetry

Tuesday Poem by Peter Akinlabi

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A Failure of Speech

A surfeit of light throws
Dark images onto the walls–

An unfamiliar thing stretches
In a glut of obstacles
Between our two shadows

On the radio, a song calls nobody’s attention
To the silent way of ruins–

When we fail at speech words become
Mined or maimed–

Our shadows rise onto each other in bad cheers
Disregarding the place of air in language

We imagine happiness and our bodies adopt
The shape of its distance–

Nothing more resembles the sounds
Of crumbling walls than the plosions
Of water tumbling by, you once said

Now I imagine the solitude of objects
Caught in a flood–

And memory is the intense eye trailing
Detritus with a bespoke impairment

Tuesday Poem by Dami Ajayi

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AUDITIONS

(For Peter)
We were catching sun,
what was left of it,
beside the shed of the
black squat woman, kind enough
to pick Gulder crowns for Peter’s audition.

Oliver de Coque’s Opportunity on repeat
& a bottle of stout for her troubles.

She pressed us to have her pepper soup;
we declined. Some news about
dressed vultures in chicken’s disguise lingers.

Peter does two hundred press-ups daily.
He is fitter than a fiddle.
He wants to be the next Ultimate man.

I have grown a paunch.
I want to be the next Joyce
& Nabokov & Camus & Faulkner.

I have picked crowns for my audition
at Up Lagos.

 

Oko, 2013.

Tuesday Poem by Dare Dan

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i’m not missing you

you come writhing your body in my sight.
sexy.
you know i’ll always be by light.

we were a flicker; a taint in the eye of a sky; a hiccup
in an hourglass.
how old is the world to your insect now,
sexy?
i let you slip each time…
and when you’re gone, leaving no ripple
in sight,
i assume you to be lost…

but memory, like water, always finds its course
this time, running amok on wings destined to be lost.
i throw you back anon
swim forlorn in the sea of my mind and
track yet a path leading not to this stand.

Tuesday Poem by Harriet Anena

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ALTER WINE
Lay me on the grass like a burnt sacrifice
Take off my clothes, one at a time, like you are opening the holy book
Read the verses of my body until you master all chapters
Taste the dishes my skin has to offer
Make me your last supper
Drink from my river of life

Let me be your alter wine

Make a perfect sign of the cross on my body
Before you take my holy communion

Welcome to my ecclesia!

Now sing for me hosanna
Until we reach the highest…

 

___________

Harriet Anena is the author of acclaimed poetry collection, A Nation in Labour. The above poem is taken from her forthcoming collection.

Tuesday Poem by Kechi Nomu

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WATERWALLS

 

It begins with Kahlo in a picture

here, she is letting her eyebrows grow 

into themselves. & here too, a boy

does not see how he breaks your heart

he citizen, you foreigner standing only inches from him.

 

Like the necessity of shadows overlapping

he says into Kahlo’s face

The lighting here is good for pictures

so that inside you feel what it is

your ship sinking . . .your sea caving under the weight of dreams

& these waterwalls in a chest of flesh.

 

Some days, they rise so high

it is impossible not to feel what you are or

see, again, how a Pharaoh drowns running away

from his waterwalls towards you,

without chariots

how a woman waits on the border

to cross a red (already) sea

without her staff&papers.

 

Here, you see this standing so close

to the length of your own shadow

so close you know what it feels like: 

 

All the caves of a body’s silence . . .

Waterwalls

 

It begins with Kahlo in a picture

here, she is letting her eyebrows grow 

into themselves. & here too, a boy

does not see how he breaks your heart

he citizen, you foreigner standing only inches from him.

 

Like the necessity of shadows overlapping

he says into Kahlo’s face

The lighting here is good for pictures

so that inside you feel what it is

your ship sinking…your sea caving under the weight of dreams

& these waterwalls in a chest of flesh.

 

Some days, they rise so high

it is impossible not to feel what you are or

see, again, how a Pharaoh drowns running away

from his waterwalls towards you,

without chariots

how a woman waits on the border

to cross a red (already) sea

without her staff&papers.

 

Here, you see this standing so close

to the length of your own shadow

so close you know what it feels like: 

 

All the caves of a body’s silence . . .

______

Kechi Nomu is a writer and editor. She tweets @KemNomu

Guest Poem: Lapidary Verse by Peter Akinlabi

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Princess--Jums-.jpg
Kofi Awoonor

he had contemplated the spirit’s final notation on the
performative self, visualising the vista of propitiation,
the body of winds that presaged the third and longest answer.
an acolyte of draped voices, he knew which hidden word
preceded a mask’s ascendancy, which indigenous bangle
death wore to a dance of dusks. he remembered to prepare
the body, a purest poem, to meet the spirit half-way to the
migrant moon.

Emily Dickinson

here, a poem resists its darkening, bursts rapturous into light
from a portmanteau; hesitant hands duly bronzed with the weight
of stealth measures insurrection of silence, the genie perfected to transgress
the art of twining. this is act insisting on its double, for shifted
as you had, the flint still glowed to glimpse the other end of conviction,
marshalling the sailor’s faith in the clairvoyance of the needle.

Ogundare Foyanmun

goat-black, your face recalls the wisp of itakun. time-travelled cube
of oguso must welcome you home. let’s lend thunder a sonorous voice,
iron a lyrical fist. let the leg that wields god’s grant conquer the other in dance,
and the maimed one lead the way like Afose, a word aimed at stars.
let the equally bad eye take its turn at the recovery of gods’ lost language.
it is so much blemishes like this that humanise the face of a god.

Amy Winehouse

you would not savour the unjagged peace of solitude,
or the quieter strain of being called out to. home would
grow in suffusion of the presence, beyond aerobic lashes,
striking the vertiginous pose between art and the landscape
of self. and all that is beautiful would interstice between
a worship and a warship.

____________

Peter Akinlabi was shortlisted for the inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize. The above poem is from his forthcoming collection, Iconography.