by Chris Anyokwu
Banished from a heartless thorax to beat a purposeless drum, she carries her heart in a bag of love to trump a mean fate.
Eyeless
Earless
Tongueless
His body sees,hears, and speaks a unique sovereignty.
Crippled by class,ruined by race,a crab in a slippery bowl, he spawns a troop that stands sentinel at the gate.
Innocent of the literate word,early doing time in poverty’s jail,his day only dawns on others’ sunset, still he brings home the village prize catch.
Drubbed to dribbling ball in ennui’s cruel wringer, and kicking death’s can down the dirt road,postponing passage,yet destiny reserves him a medal at race end.
Margin dweller, charity’s squatter, poster-child of deprivation, driftwood floating from here to there, trying the hardest to fit in in a never-never-land of proud privilege
But it is the hand that weaves festoons of fate and erects altar to ego that says NO! to naysayers and killjoys: madu bu chi onwe!*
Dry,then,the deluge,
Sorrow’s child, for the day’s last light is eternity of opportunity to wrest glory from defeat’s teeth.
Not to soar to Iroko’s top to fetch life’s wood, there are no excuses.
@ Chris Anyokwu.
(* Igbo for One is one’s own creator).
Anyokwu, lectures in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Lagos.
Piercing, incisive, sensitive… your pen drips as always with the choreographed brutality of a mortician’s blade. It opens and dissects the entrails with a calm rigour that is mesmerising. So, much of the attraction is your capacity to hold this unfazed gaze at the decadent, your incessant prodding of the festering, putrefying sore of indigence, disease and death. Though I must add, quickly, that this is often pulled off without the faintest hint of the grotesque, or of any intimation of the ludicrous. Stuffs of genius.
My perspective of this present servings is one of a haunting cauldron of a forlorn dweller of the backwater of society. Seemingly oblivious of the odds that are stacked high against him ( could be she), he faces the deprivation of provincial life with disarming innocence, even looking forward to jaded trophies of the “village prize catch”. As they say, hope is the last thing that dies in a man.
This is poetry in the mold of the masters; rich with relatable symbols and motifs. Very enjoyable reading.