Four Poems
Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto
MONOLOGUE WRITTEN AFTER WATCHING A ROBIN LIFT FROM A TREE BRANCH
A legend goes that a man is first a man.
And then the legend questions itself.
I want to know yesterday and its cognates,
But what actually is tumbling in my thought is the image of whirling
Spittle in the mouths of two adults kissing in a public toilet.
Sometimes my thoughts deny me the freedom of hearing my arraignments.
And every time I walk onto a pond, I take it to not mean someone’s tears.
It’s another day today and I have taken an axe and dismantling my boundaries;
Let the morning birds, bearing with them
Mozart’s pears and Igbo waffles, wet crystals and twigs,
Fly into my body and fill in the spaces where I lack.
I lack in excitement. In openness. And in finding.
In gardens. In roses. And in metaphors.
I lack in my country. Lack. Lack. Lack.
And I have staged my country many times before
Men and women, before my past and present,
Wanting to know if I did any wrong living in it,
If I did any wrong tendering my mistakes and verity in it.
I carry wishes I have for my country with two hands God gave me
And with care so they don’t fall apart, so they don’t
Someday turn to pines riddling my back and its cord.
I understand that sometimes we cannot defeat our supplications.
And my friend who loves playing chess often tells me that
At the end of a tunnel we sometimes find a leopard’s claw
Or, in all probability, we find a train coming upon us.
But I don’t want to believe it. But I don’t want to believe it.
It’s another day today and I am wondering about its arms and legs.
I AM ON A ROAD AND MY MOUTH IS FULL OF QUESTIONS
about the ways in which we have become so full of paralytic
appendages, so full of shortcomings, hunger and silences.
I am always with questions because there’s something
in what doesn’t need to be forgotten; I mean we
sometimes see a man and our voice becomes his voice.
In the morning, I arrange my conscience into justice.
I believe in justice because I understand.
And because I believe in justice and understand, I often want
to compare my days to that night before Christ’s crucifixion.
And I have been wondering how much Christ must have felt.
I am nearer to my pains – it’s the only way I weigh my punctured
clouds, the only way I know I would save myself again. And again.
And the only way I keep stitching my identity and keep taming
my tongue rising with mollusk and rusting prayers.
I wonder sometimes if one can forget (his pains)
by dressing his tongue with another language.
I wonder sometimes if one can suppress (his loneliness)
by downing his tongue in another language.
There’s something about _______ that we keep
returning to those moments someone rejected us.
Perhaps, we need so we can be needed.
I often stretch my hands to memorize the shape of my memories.
And the one memory I can never tire of is that of my
father who I lost at fourteen. These days, I arrange my nameable scars
so the past wouldn’t mistake me for a dog howling at night.
But I wish to ask: what purpose is this conversation if the birds still
look down upon us and wonder about the places we’re never tender?
WHAT THE LORD SAID
for Adedayo Agarua and Kolawole Samuel
When the Lord said,
‘My Cup runneth over,’
O dear, it was my
Beauty it meant.
Uriah in the Bardo
Yesterday, my mother called to
know if I am safe where I am.
I asked her why, she said she heard from the
news that there have been gunshots
at my end since Friday and
now and then, people pack up
their goods and run. Nobody
knows what is really happening,
and you don’t wait for your dead body
to be why people find out.
You run. You are safe.
After the call, I began to think about
Uriah: how people who are blind to
a situation use their own
legs and run into a shark’s mouth.