Looking Back
(for Oyorokoto)
I turn to search your footsteps from acres of solitude away,
to listen to the song of your tide singing home the fishers.
but you are gone from me, the way ocean of becoming,
its tributaries always beckoning flotsam of dreams,
constantly wash young pebbles off your brine shore.
I, whom survival weaned from your breast, am underfed.
I sleep and wake in Obio-Akpor, in Ikwerre,
still starved of language in my State,
the creek in my soup bowl empty of fish and periwinkle,
my appetite feeding, instead, on the cruelty of city life.
each time I turn to look upon your face,
distance always fogs the sea of acquaintances,
a fisherman is always betrayed by his mast, paddle or water.
each day, a boat returns full of water in my dreams,
while I write lifeboats with a language full of holes.
Market Day, Rumuokoro
In this basket of foods and faces, sizzling poetry of strife,
the market hens always rise with the corks’ calls
to answer the summon of survival, seven crows each week,
eager to dare the country’s hunger-rife life;
emaciated albatross threshing dank bowel of dawn
to catch early worms, the hens, too, feed on the worms
gnawing the entrails of this city of gangrene gardens.
on makeshift lanes, their umbrella shades mushroom,
tares on taskforce’s mildewed policies, to break fog off the eye of day.
exposed wares flank passing feet, bestriding grime-grim gutters.
dung muds know the women’s soles the way they, too, know the flies:
everything is allowed a token of freedom here, even the faggots;
the flies milling through the naked fingers of buyers turning over meat slabs,
weighing and haggling, haggling and weighing. a buyer throws
a touch of garri into her mouth before asking for the price:
if e no be Ikwerre or Etche, I no go buy o. the seller smiles
her affirmations, dipping a milk-tin cup in and out of her basin into polythene.
poured into the sounds of loudspeakers blaring the might of herbal drugs,
the bus loader’s hoarse song calls commuters onto minibuses,
soloing his fifty-naira levy than mercies to their journey, chorusing:
here where everyone holds their safety in their pockets or handbags,
do not leave your care to the world or the world in your care.
nearby, a beggar brandishes a bowl at passing handbags and trousers,
hauling prayers of replenishing with the flair of an okrika cloth seller
throwing wares at passers-by, singing sweet adverts to court their pockets.
whenever I enter the music of this place marketing strife,
the poet in me longs to buy the poetry of the traders’ lives,
to feed the mouths of the world hungry for stories;
to feed my hunger, someday, when empty pots and plates
remind me this market will never notice I, too, passed through here.
Nket Godwin is a poet, essayist and literary critic. His work has appeared on Afrocritik, Harbor Review, African Writer, The Nigeria Review, Libretto, Eunioia Review, Konya Shamrumi, Afreecan Read, Con Scio, Eboquill, Afrihill, Ikike Arts, Voyage of 90 Years with Kongi, anthology in honour of Wole Soyinka (Abibiman Publishers, UK), and elsewhere.
Cover photo: dotun55
