1.
Enigmata.
You hated fruitless journeys abroad, yet
Aligned into a wasted generation at home:
Preferred Kafka quaffed in straight draughts
Yet stooped to housebreak Euripides for us:
A tiger flauntet not it’s tigritude, you said
As niggers brandished their negritude,
But now your leonine roar at life
Dovetails with your mane and gait.
You who weathered the storm
Of our nascent nationhood
In the deep recesses
Of your avid patriotism,
Starring in stick-and-burst ups
As the going got tough,
Even gentrifying their can
With your esteemed presence,
Only to reap the teargas
Of a protracted militarism
Steered by outsiders
Outweeping the bereaved.
Forget them that presume
The esoteric cant and creed
Of your bandana-ed clique at Ibadan
Spawned the current mayhem on campus –
For how can your hirsute self
Linguistic majesty et al
Partake in a cornucopia
Of raw skull and crossbones
And not puke your guts to submission
In second, third and fourth comings?
© Isidore Emeka Uzoatu 2004.
2.
Stigmata.
laureate des nos jours:
who’d’a thunk it
capo di tutti capi:
on Kawasaki of penultimate machismo
connoisseur par excellence:
of the arts, wine & all
obscurantist extraordinaire:
raven bums up, peroxide palms down
fabulist ex nihilo:
setting chume et al forth afore dawn
thespian sino dubio:
even in plots of own manufacture
raconteur in excelsis:
& the man resurrected in ake childhood
fashionista faux-naïf:
as in dressing to please the self
nationalista in extremis:
stick-up tape exchange a gogo
songista ab initio:
when Nigeria never jaga jaga –
ten things to ten men
a la Paul to the Corinthians,
yet John the Baptist in the wild west
to the eleventh,
as decapitated bodies homed east
after the blackout…
longer may you live
sans stigma.
© Isidore Emeka Uzoatu 2014.
3.
Charismata.
When a thoroughbred enigma
Acquires the burden of a stigma
It forces on him another trauma
Only survivable via charisma.
But truth is that while all the former
Brook no oeuvres with the Divine,
The latter only comes – and goes –
As ordered from Elysium heights.
Before the tides tumbled overnight
Your orders came through impervious
With tribe and tongue mattering little
If at all…
Then the captain’s orders
Became solely for others –
The landlubbers, uninitiated
And uncircumcised, perhaps.
A tribe became responsible
For the June 12 annulment
Orchestrated as proven
By all the 250+ of us;
And the heist of February 25
Grabbing, seizing and running
Was okayed for a mess of jollof
And, well, a cache of crockery…
Reawakening the gregarious stream
Of our hitherto deadpan consciences
Hibernating beneath the waters
Since a thirty-month sabbatical:
Pronto we see Unoka’s cold sperm
Spawning Okonkwo’s roaring flame
Before morphing back once again
To Nwoye’s cold ash at the hearth.
After all, not unlike all the magma
Hidden deep in pubescent plasma,
Even lava vomited by Mount Etna
Eventually turns to ash and stone.
Talk of spiritual dryness cutting either way
Between both Christian and Pagan savants
Of the one and only possible creator of all
Taken too high up for any to comprehend.
Like Ss Teresa of Lisieux and Calcutta
Coped with when they trod earth still…
© Isidore Emeka Uzoatu 2024.
