Finally I Know You
- For ESIABA IROBI
I have finally discovered you
ESIABA IROBI
I that longed to paean about cracking laughters
and large hearts
From your rocky roots in Futa Djallon
Through the humps of this rugged earth
To your first ejaculates into the Atlantic intake
Itself the uptake of vaster melodrama
of lounging waves and man-tides and –
I have finally discovered you
Not hands locked by wine glass
telling Chimamanda how – by way of praise –
you found some page of Half of a Yellow Sun sexually stimulating
at the Okigbo conference at Harvard
in two-thousand-and-seven when Achebe and Soyinka
regaled captive eardrums with tales of stolen chicken at Fiditi
along with their wives, or then-spouses
As our own nods sealed us as accessories in that chicken catch-and-cook
Way back in the Fiditi days …
- Mind: I speak nothing here but poetruth
I saw your teary eyes
When Achebe did the icho madu* ritual for his buddy
Christopher Okigbo
Denied one in his homestead when
the sound of flying bullets that trumped the hum of war drums
finally drowned out all evidence of birdsongs
You could not stand his searching dirge unconstrained by wheel-chair
Still I did not know you, ESIABA IROBI
UNTIL…
I found you in these verdant verses
In the good old pulp
eye found you in the pages of your entreaties
to implacable gods, of this millipede-stubborn life
in your quest for embrace, for earthunion,
and, unknown to you, for canonization
by the white smokes of the puritan conclave
and your lust for JANE BRYCE’s ‘feline prose’
you are probably the reason I returned to town
Ile-Ife
this town that grew me up in deep lores
still sentient with ancient newness –
to be tickled by the slim beauty of your Inflorescence.
This repudiation of a well-made poem
Purring its beauty out in the
Crumbs left behind after the king termite had feasted
in pulp-and-pageANTry
Ah, ESIABA: If only you could see what goes for poetry now!
NOTE
*Icho mmadu: part of Igbo funeral ritual. Achebe organized what is believed to be an impromptu one for his buddy Christopher Okigbo at the Okigbo Conference, Harvard University, in September 2007
aihuomaimminentriver 