Baby oku!
by Chris Anyokwu
Welcome distraction in hell’s melee of sweat merchants running like primary colours in perspiration, those time’s inmates sentenced for a term in mobile jails on snarling road.
Those hounds of hell chasing them to haunts of relief lose their dread in your healing presence:
Standing as a gazelle lost in forest mazes, eyes shooting a message of love, and limbs, fluent like Badagry palms speaking of dreams reserved only for royals.
The peeping jigida encircling the narrow nubile waist sets the world on fire!
Baby oku!
Professor Chris Anyokwu
This fire is burning many a roof,upending town with boys sporting with fire to lay waste the heirlooms.
But must you,Baby oku, materialise at crossroads where fates are being hammered out to forge sundry destinies?
Oh,Baby oku!
Your fire can cleanse ores and alloys of impurities and not set the very earth on fire.
@ Chris Anyokwu. January 31,2024.
( Oku is Igbo for fire; and jigida is waist bead).
Anyokwu, lectures in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts University of Lagos.
