Early One Morning

Beneath the basements of restless hills,
early one morning, local dews spoke dimly
of the previous night's rain.
Larks were late to sing anthems of a proud
village, hung on a crest of green earth.
I woke up at five o'clock when the world
still slobbered from gentle risings.

Cocks crowed, and their voices reached the
caverns beyond our silhouetted thresholds,
and indistinct hums from sable-garmented
crows rustled through my door.

Just then, came a voice oiled in throaty
richness . . .
Belinda, fair and distributed by ways of
alarming camaraderie, braved the harsh winds
with her hurricane lamp.
Sitting on the wooded chair of ailing oak,
her Goodmorning was supple; her hair, one mass
of woolly blackness, danced in the wind; her cloak
reeked of native jests, and her manners
were like the early morning: fertile.
As the gaunt, twisted flame of her lamp
blinked, the moment became charged with
every truth of silenced moments . . .
Her sweet eyes glowed on the golden wall of the
flame, and each glow and each blink filled
my eyes which reflected Belinda's - love-filmed

Copyright © 2010 Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

Behind the Sun

The faces of the tom-toms were sallow,
So was the face of the sun, dark-visaged,
Red, and starved through a pogrom
That assaulted the peace of the beasts.

Darkness spelt the names of diseases,
Each pronounced through stiffened tongues,
Whited by the scourge of hate – a common
Figure, cadaverous and laconic, but incestuous.

Grieving rivers sought ways to be rechristened
Or rebaptized by holy rills with less fetor, as
Long as riparian languages were still spoken on
Breaths of brooks, broken, but gathered in bits

By hands that leaned on fermented soot only.
And darkness persisted, perspiring from hostile
Beats of hollow drums when fire reaches them
From tormented skies.

One truth loomed: the truth of a disvirgined
Destiny, clothed in serrated raiment of grief.
On its crown, shredded petals of holocausts
Form toothless thorns shaped like lightning.

Death was prominent, dispirited, and hung loose
On strings smelted on anvils raging from heinous
Rape of a blooded land. Shores wept with humour
When our frightened coasts sneezed with mirth.

Copyright © 2010 Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

Cigarette Smoke

On a warm, dew-weakened day,
Watching the grey void of a lost
Sense, anxious moments recline
On whiffs of ancestral propitiations
When rafters regain possession of
Filched roast fish, balanced with
The fumes of a wild dance heckled
By chokes of a chagrined weekend.
Who rises faster than smokes of a
Low tar, ascending
Gently,
Whimsically,
Lazily,
With rings of white life
Extinguished through banalities,
Through clamoured waste? . . .
Such rise - gay, sensuous rise
Of the thin beam,
Goes with every thread of meaning
Long since posted on the banner of
Meaningful dreams.

Copyright © 2010 Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu