Akwu Sunday Victor writes

I Live and Leave Nameless

Do you know what it takes to be
What I am not?
Do you know what it means
At the midpoint of my life
To chameleon off my identify
And wear the ones you offered?
I don't know why you look me in the eyes
And conclude that I am good for nothing
Yes, if not why raise your hands against me?
Why deny me the sunlight of peace of heart?
My heart have I given you. I gave it to you
Even when I know yours was not fully given me.
You hoarded your heart, but I yielded mine.
I took my father's name, squeezed it and flung
It away like a tattered garment and put on yours
Initially it was like a borrowed rope but stoically
I ran with the name until it stuck like my shadow
I stuck to you when you were a shadow
I cleaved to you when you had no name
Now you turn me into a rag for the world
To scrub filthy floors and now you look me
In the eyes as if I were a piece of rotten wood
You who was to shield me from the sun now lash
Me with heartless claws, why?
Do you know what I have sacrificed to be what I am not?
I should have been this, but I am that because of you.
The greenness of my flesh is faded
I have died a thousand times in the theatre
Just to bring to life that which will not bear my name.
I am a shadow, I live without a name, I die nameless
But why will you lift up your hands, your voice
Against I who hold your life in my kitchen pot?


Light and Shadow -- Moriguchi Mitsuru

Akwu Sunday Victor writes

There was a Time

There was a time,

Now I can't trace its contours

A time when a strange fire
Burned in my breast
Alone in unspoilt reveries
I with a sorcerer's will
Conjure imagery of today
Imagery of walking across the confluence
Imagery of jumping over Kilimanjaro
And this lass who made my soul to soar
Around whom like the only stream in a village
I built the huts of my dreams
Today, alone in a place far from where
In my reveries of yore I set up myself
Today, here I am in a place outside of my moon
Alone, looking at the sun fading away
Alone, staring at the trees in the distant
And my reveries seem a broken egg.

The woman has left and even the ghost
Of my former dreams kept eluding me.
Am I not a leper to the world I once dreamt?

 

Akwu Sunday Victor writes

Slaughter House
                             For Dr. Ayodele Bamidele

A big barn of flowing blood
A big slaughter house 
Broken bones everywhere,
The great slaughter house of humanity

Iroko with broken boughs
Elephant without tusk
Lion with dust choked throat and broken claws

Every night, new orphans are hatched
Every day new widows are weaned
Every day petals of life are rudely plucked
Off the great bough of life by crude fingers

By the street corners
Papers of death announce it
At dusk the town crier announces it

The broken roads, serpentine are harvesting theirs
They lie in wait for the rickety iron horse
With broken hoofs and blind eyes
Carcasses of burnt iron horses adorn our road sides

God's hitmen with un-turbaned blades harvest
Their own portion of life's petals, crudely
Cutting down fields of sunflower with bestial passion
Cutting off mushrooms' heads while tapes roll
And the same sent to the ends of the earth, inspiring dread

Cain and Abel engaged in primordial contradiction,
Locusts from Abel's groin invade Cain's offspring's farmland
With intense vengeance and with mandibles of iron
They munch the land, ruin harvested barns, mangle growing blades,
Their cattle crunch stems, corn, seedlings and crush
Ridges and heaps of sand, making flat, hills
And when Cain's descendants, the antithesis
Opposes the thesis of violence and impunity
A synthesis of bloodbath ensures with undertones of religion

House of Slaughter,
Daily new widowers are made,
Daily the ululation of newly recruited widows
Darken the earscape
Daily the dismal configuration of orphans
Makes the eyes of the seer misty

Ours is a slaughter house,
Where lives are cow dung

Ours is a slaughter house,
Where life's flower is crushed with impunity

Ours is a slaughter house
Where no one cares when life's petal is cut short
Where no one speaks when life's flare is put out

The sun rises and falls
And life goes on unperturbed
By booms of bazooka
And the last cries of the dead and dying

Ours is a vast theatre of the absurd
Where cocks crow at noon
Where the sun shines in the night
And the moon at noonday
Where life is stranger than fiction
Where life is an ant,
An ant crushed and lost in the sand

Ours is a slaughter house
Where our caretakers dish death to us
In Iscariot's kiss.

Slaughterhouse 5 -- Terry Oakes