The Poetry Marathon

The crow of a lone cock
signals the break of dawn
unleashing multiple crows

men who had hardly slept all night
roll up their mats, gird their loins,
unsheathe their machetes

and hit the bush path
to the village square
the town-crier

had sounded urgent:
at the first crow
of the lone cock

it must be the war
with the neighbouring clan
over border land

nothing can be more urgent
but alas, the cunning white DC
has come to pacify this land

When prompts
give no clue

pen-paper intercourse
births no poem

keyboard stares
at blank screen

no image, no song
can fertilise
an arid soil

but a poet
must poetise

That evening when the call
came that broke the news
that broke my heart
the receding sun was a dark ball

death in the house

my heart sank
like an undermined building

mama gone?

this isn’t just a death
it’s THE death

and you said to me:

Cry, it will make you calm
suffer your tears to flow
they’ll someday dry

but no –
my tears flow still
when, like a hollow gong,
that voice rings in my head

death in the house

that evening
the darkest evening
of my life

is forever etched on
my memory’s wall

Line 21 borrowed from line 8 of Robert Frost’s

I must have been six or so
when, unsoiled yet by the world’s many worries,
I played in the rain, naked and wild

with children my age or more or less
chasing termite alates freshly
unleashed from their colonies

we ran around in the rain
chanting in our native tongue
praying the rain to bring us bounties

a group of termites would fly over our
heads, lazily, yet beyond the reach
of our tiny limbs

we would wait, patiently, raindrops
dripping down our little bodies, knowing
it’s only a matter of time before

these elusive termites would lose grip and land,
lose their wings and become easy
pick into our waiting bowls

the rain would continue to splatter
away as we return home with our catch
our outside refreshed, our insides hopeful

Chuks Oluigbo, journalist and editor, lives in Lagos, Nigeria.

The Fourth Lap

Ah!

The fourth lap nears its end

With I bruising through lap three

My head blank as a slate

The prompt telling me nil

Blank head breeds

Blank sheet breeds

Blank screen.

Poetry is not a game

But this is marathon

And I must reach the end

A poem per hour

And here’s to Hour Four.

A Place of Pain

From where does your poetry flow?

Is it from the crematoria that sucked up

Countless corpses of your type

Gulped by yesterday’s pandemic?

Or from the Mediterranean

Drinking the blood of youngsters

Fleeing failure’s web?

Or the mass graves

Swallowing millions

Felled by terror-mongers

In peacetime?

These lines that run so deep

Where do they come from?

These bloodied lines

Dripping from your pen

Tainting your pages

Must be from a place of pain

For I read the sorrow in your words.

To the Petitioner

Your words pour

like libation

upon a shrine

upon the bosom of a goddess

as from an ancient gourd

in the hands of an old dibia.

But, is that resignation I see

in your downcast eyes?

Let your libation

flow unhindered

for this deity

the inhabitant of this shrine

shall in time heed

and shall your petition grant.

Tongue of Fire

His uncouth tongue spits fire,

Then it spits petrol inflaming the fire

Encircling our enclave.

His tongue unearths ghosts,

Bitter ghosts roving

In yesteryears’ graveyards.

They did not die in peace,

They would not rest in peace.

So they angle for war.

Yet, citizens crave his tongue.

‘Speak to us,’ they scream.

And when he does,

His tongue threatens genocide,

Awakens revisionists scavenging

Dustbins for discarded morsels of history

To feed their nihilistic appetite.

This fire, if unquenched,

Will leave no one unscathed.