Five more excerpts from the forthcoming Augusta’s Poodle (Poems of Childhood) by Ogaga Ifowodo
XVIII
Suddenly, the wizened old poet spoke
and it was as if he had fired a pistol,
the dog yelped and ran round his master’s legs
then crouched in the corner with old books.
A hole on the floor where it had been turned
dark, a blob of dogblood. “You’ve killed
the wretched thing,” I said. “Not at all,” he said.
“I’m as precise with my shot as with my words.”
His voice came over the jubilant cries
on the television of politicians
after results of a ritual vote,
blood browning on broken ballot boxes.
The bullet-shaved white hair of the dog,
same white as the old poet’s haloed head,
curled into a neat knot on the floor
and then he said something about eggs
keened, conned or cornered.
I was speechless.
I had been summoned from sleep or nightmare
in the living shade of a dead master,
the air and the walls still trembling
with the elemental force of his puzzling words,
with the mystery of his still unspoken words.
XXXI
Dust on corn leaves, but they had browned
under the relentless sun. The coming rains
will rot their roots and ungathered cobs
but when we pass the forlorn acres, we will return
to the memory of tassels frothful with joy
in green fields swept clean by wandering winds.
After the field of corn and yam, harvested
and lying fallow to renew the soil
with dead leaves, earthworms’ burrowings
and the labours of dungbeetles, comes the primal
forest of Okpesia, dwelling of the Great Gorillas.
Its trees of the beginning, primordial barks
hoarding the custodial magic that flows
up to branches interlaced above your head
and stretched to every corner of the world.
Okpesia beckoned with more than the pure oxygen
of its filtered air, the pure waters clean
and black with the mysteries of equatorial
origins: the birds’ cantatas petrified
the forest anew and the stillness of all
but avian melodies, the murmured harmonies
of brooks over fallen leaves, leads you into dream:
the days can cease their intolerable noise
the sky can be cleansed of its dust and poisons
we shall all be happy in the return to earth.
XLVII
The slowly fading circle of the sun
the slowly closing lids of eyes dampened
by the searing memory of inhuman grief.
A sudden clattering and the downpour,
liquid rods of chastening water, arrows
of heaven to perforate the January-crusted
earth. The frightful gutturals of God
directing the ritual of regeneration
remind me of the first poetry, incom-
prehensible syllables that never failed
to wrack and rip my pounding heart,
send me scurrying to my mother’s legs.
God crying out his mighty eyes, threatening
to drown the world again, but this sullen noon
will not dampen the radiance of your eyes!
Landscapes planted in flood plains, forever
freshened by the rain. To look up after
the storm, becalmed by the petrichor
from wood and grass, is to succumb
to your native sky! The spellbound past grips
you with both arms round the waist and won’t let
go till the future, tensed, breaks the silence.
L
Sun and rain in degrees of tenderness
groom the trees all year long. The soft fall
of the light on the leaves, lingering like
the silver tongue of an absent lover:
it made the trees shiver and shimmer
in countless shades of green. And in poor
or bright light, seductive breeze or vicious
heat, the streets, the eyes behind flimsy
curtains, the trees waving softly to the wind,
welcomed me.
And every ray of the sun,
every drop of rain, every blade of grass
blessed my return. When rainstorms
had exhausted themselves washing the forest,
and that clean musk perfume suffuses the air,
I could make my bed under an iroko
or redwood tree when even birds are silent,
lie face to the sky and its cauliflower clouds
or sit and watch till the avian choir,
heeding a hidden baton, wakened to song
electrifying the forest and rousing
the squirrel to offer a nut in standing ovation.
LII
Kaolin white paths. I followed them at dewy
dawns to ponds, to boyish traps in tangled
bushes, set more with hope, a child’s love
of work as play than hunter’s cunning.
Barefoot-battened paths: I followed them
to sparse acres of sky-high slender-stemmed
palm trees that swayed in manic ecstasy,
locked in a death dance with the furious wind
plucking wide-branched tap-rooted trees
from the earth just before the thundering sky
unleashed its arsenal of rain spears:
how the palm trees, so slender
stayed unbroken in that fury
of wind that flung roofs like floppy
old hats far from walls held down
by surprise filled me with the fear
of things that move by stealth unseen.
Kaolin paths of battened clay: I followed
them to the creeks and great ponds, the hot
vapours of the swamp in January, rising
like a wet sheet invisible till it wraps
you with that unforgettable odour
of marine lives cooked in alluvial mud
by a relentless tropical sun, the wet tang
of decay amidst the spawn of new life.
I followed the paths cut by the naked feet
of unsung forebears to yam fields, unfenced
household plots, their narrow bounds known
only to the brave tillers whose sweat, mixed
with the dead leaves of two fallow years, ash
of the burnt fields, is all that fertilises
the drained soil to banish hunger and despair
in these places left to fend for themselves.
Paths of clay and black loam, overhung
with long blades of elephant grass, I
followed them home, every shrub and every tree
sparkling under the moon, my path luminous,
lighted by falling leaves twirling in the wind.
LIV
Nne. I slept every night near her unfaded hair,
a headrest of soothing black wool.
Mother of the house of love: her eyes burned
their endless wicks for the perpetual
light brighter than the midnight moon.
Above the silver of our zinc roof, the moon
pressed a white udder to quench earth’s
midnight thirst with the light of her milk.
Truths flashed from the depths of her eyes,
rebuking waywardness and indolence
with sharper sting than words or even cane.
All the birds sang in her throat to soothe
the afflicted minutes, break the stranglehold
of grief from the unnameable death
of joy in the stricken house, its walls drunk
with memory and loss, crumbling to the ground.
All the doves cooed to her prayer
for the thin and hungry man standing
like a ghost under his leaking roof,
hemmed in by laterite walls dripping with the rain:
the doves coo to her prayer for the thin
and hungry man, his eyes salting his face,
staring at the glittering blade of his razor.
LV
And there I found myself a being on this earth
its boundless reaches, its rimless circumference
unknowable to me, a boy barely three, barefoot
under a mango tree in a green-shaded
spot of the African rainforest. The air
blew softly into my heart and quickened me
to knowledge of air itself, shadows and myself.
Here I saw the sky for the first time,
the blinding flash of lightening at midday,
the thunder threatening to end the world.
I followed with dazed eyes the tube of light
from under the weighed-down orange trees,
minting bright coins at my feet. Here I saw
flowers open up their fertile hearts
to the rising sun, seed the air with pollen.
I should have begun with Oleh, first note
of my umbilical chord, but what did I
know, on awakening, of my first residence
on earth? My eyes were still sealed from memory’s
vault, mere sensors of colour and light,
when a woman widowed once again, orphaned
at nine or sooner, tied to her back the boy
she’d craved after three daughters and the last
husband heartbreak in search of solace
with an uncle in her Garden of Ẹzẹ.
And there I sat five-and-a-half decades
later on a rainwashed bamboo bench,
bees buzzing in honey petals, to begin
my song of beginnings. And bathed
in the luminescence of my primal garden,
sandaled feet tapping to the beat of my heart,
listening to the delirious deliberations
of the birds’ treetop parliament, I call
out to the world vaster than day or dream
could ever measure, could ever give words,
certain every ell of the earth hears my voice.
