Bamboo, Bride of The Forest
Bamboo, bride of the forest
the cymbals of winds & your fine
many knees
ripens with the autumn’s mouth.
The bush rat i chased,
found refuge in you;
a border set under these roots
cannot be trampled on.
Your belly button hoists
all mysteries into the silvered sky
as the crows flies &
as the mamba strikes.
Do not tame me like the panda.
I am not the carnassial,
protruding.
The seed of a swollen hunger quakes
I call the dearth in a testimony
of pyre. Let the forest uncoil
like a smile of smokes, let it yield
my quarry, I pray.
I caked the forest with flame. My
hunger ate something bigger
than lunch.
A squirrel panicked
at my feet, I can’t speak of its anguish
lipping an uncertain regret in me
cache into a rainstick spent in the incense
of hunger. Hollow, supple in the ash
of sighs, burning the forest’s grief into me.
A pellet of unendingness
billows between us; the squirrel & bamboo
the fire & I.
A Mini Thunder Across My Thumb, 2005
The swinging bench with rust growing
in its iron hold, the aged palm tree
with ashen hands, weeping
into carpets of amaranth & goatweed
along the Prestige Road, whose summer crown
the dim dun of the moon sits upon together
with night jars, marsh owls and other
silhouettes of nightly things, with the anthem
of crickets filling the evening breeze.
This place wraps me into 2005 and there is us, young,
fresh to the wonder of hormones, perfect, except that
the memory faults the present in a swollen tongue
of corrosion and neglect, night birds in lieu
of morning birds, and the palm tree was small
enough for nine-years-olds to rip into its throat
and pluck ripe teneras] In one early adventure of digging deep
for a redder bunch, a spine tore through my right thumb
but what I didn’t notice until the following morning were two
fresh scars, each as fuchsia as the inside of dianthus.
One on my lower lip. The other on the thumb.
How hard can it be to discern blood from
a messy drip of the red juice? What disarmed
the hurt into oblivion? The shades of fronds? The savouring
of raw red oil? The delicious wound of a first kiss?
The wonder of two mouths eating a fruit? The kernels
of some memories fragment without grace,
reaping shards, scattered & whole,
the suspiral of first kiss and glorified scars.
Ruins of Neglect
The funnel of perennial grief, this body,
Burning itself in the wake of history—
In one corner, someone caught the ocean
Inside a dragnet, a pull on the Celsius scale.
Put the measure in your mouth and spell f i r e—
In another corner, the skirts of Amazon
Caught a wild flame, a pregnant porcupine
Sits between the intersection of dews & ashes,
Her body, weary of needling up an unheard protest—
Greta Thunberg holds thunder in her tongue
But nothing breaks the penthouses’ owner’s slumber
Ridging into carbon, layered with bonds of nails &
Charcoaled songs. Do you not understand that we wear
The same body? That the change eats us alike like clouds?
That the ruins of your neglect is ruining me also?—
Thick, this neglect splitting the delta, the oil hugging
The fingers of opercula of a naked city—
In Port Harcourt, oxygen is a burnt lady, the inhaled
Air carries her weight of sin into the lungs of boys
Left fish-mouthed at the juncture Rumuokoro grieves—
Mouth to mouth with chimneys, the trachea whistling
A black long dirge into this shredded version of nightmares.
*Winner of the 2022 Climate Change Poetry Prize