ktravula – a travelogue!

the Nigerian Ghoul in an American Forest

Notes on Obscurity

by Benson Eluma
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1.
Sister Mustard died someplace
Mount Ebola, I think, in Africa.
They planted a mine on the headstone
For a curious little boy to play with.
Kaboom! and his lost limbs made
A weeklong presence on international news.
Sister Mustard turned
And smiled in her death…
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2.
The ants worked hard in the sun
Following the ancient wisdom.
But this year the rains did not fall; they waxed
Lyrical, Hard Rock melting sand-home and barn.
Afterwards, camera crews rushed
To scoop water; their
Precision instruments detailing
The wreckage to the last microscopic fractal…
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3.
The poetaster wrote his dying song
After so many years of ruing the ignominy
Of his verse, the evil recalcitrance of his stylus.
He sent it out, a warning to others trying the impossible.
But the critics, hard up for new conundrums,
Overturned every stone;
They scoured every cave
To lay laurels at his unmarked grave…
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4.
And Daodu, born on the first day
In the Year of Jubilee, a complete set of teeth
Fortifying his infant gums,
Died a plenipotentiary with 300 monuments.
And the worms went to work on the annals.
And floods ravaged the city year after year.
And finally a generation arose in whose memory
Daodu’s name, undecipherable, was a dead talisman…
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Used by permission.
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Notes on Obscurity was published on May 1st, 2010, with the tags , , under the Art, Fun, Opinion category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

-WB Yeats

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The Lake Isle of Innisfree was published on April 17th, 2010, with the tags , , under the Art, Fun category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

Nostalgia – A Not So Old Poem

Do men really feel or just believe? In wandering afterthoughts from your sonic alter-ego,
Love, my belly tickles to a distant bell in childhood paces around our childish lusts.
See me there on the streets of dustland, with heels on the playground of luckless rants.
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Am I supposed to feel this way again, muse? Your voice spins me to a thousand memories.
I do not stir, nor does the droplets in my eye move beyond their range of steam. No. Muse,
I do not control this softness that drives me across a beaten path towards your taken arms.
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It is the voice of the night, or else a green-eyed beacon that pushes these fingers to work, and
To stalk: “Traveller, your love has not always been without the crawl of blunt senseless drive.”
It is the delirious dope of distance then, or caprice, or a flighty strong wind of love’s nostalgia.
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Nostalgia – A Not So Old Poem was published on February 26th, 2010, with the tags , , , under the Art, Fun, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Two Poems for Wenger

I wrote this poem last January for Susanne Wenger when news broke that she had passed, and sent it to a couple of friends and a few listservs. Poet Benson Eluma was one of the people who wrote a response in poetry to my offering back then. Click here to read his poem, now published in Nigeria’s NEXT newspaper. The poetic meeting of Benson and I on the campus of the Ibadan University is a long story for another day.

Here below is the final version of what I wrote back then, thanks to a few suggestions from Lola Shoneyin.

Like Chalk in the River

For Susanne, Olorisha!

They said it rained when Suzanne was buried.
It poured.
They spoke of a rumble of the heavens
as the Orisha Osun swam back, again, to her pristine source.

They talked of art.
They spoke of beauty.
They mentioned hands
That sculpted spirits.

But now when the forests have stopped dancing with the rain,
See the wind escape from that storied grove.
Look, amid the hallowed haze,
at a turning twirl of her spirit gaze.

Gone is the eye that looked out for the standing stems
When greed called for arms, and men scorned sense, and all she wove.

Today, the Spirit it was that left, again,
To return. To return: a time-bound god, or else a travelling dove.

NOTE: Susanne Wenger was the Austrian artist who lived most of her life in Osogbo Nigeria as a priestess of the river Osun. Born in Austria, she met and married the German artist Professor Ulli Beier who brought her to Nigeria in the 1949. The couple quickly assimilated in Nigeria, he as a teacher and she as an artist, but they moved from Ibadan to the nearby town of Ede in 1950 to escape what Wenger called the “artificial university compound”. In Ede, she met one of the last priests of the rapidly disappearing, ancestral-based Olorisha religion. She quickly became engrossed in his life and rituals, even though at that time she spoke no Yoruba. “Our only intercourse was the language of the trees,” she said later.

Her work in Osogbo for the many parts of her life included an enormous effort to protect the sacred grove of Osun, a forest along the banks of the Oshun river just outside Osogbo, which she turned into a sculpture garden filled with art made by her and others. The sacred groves of Osun are now UNESCO World Heritage Sites thanks in most part to her efforts. (Read more about her life here).

She died last January in Osogbo, her adopted home, at the age of 92.

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Two Poems for Wenger was published on January 23rd, 2010, with the tags , , , , , under the Art, News, Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

Re-Reading Myself

Re-reading oneself can be such a boring chore that I’ve always tried to avoid because of the emotions it inevitably brings back. Most times, one is just too glad to be rid of the overwhelming feelings that make one write in the first place to go back at will. I’ve just finished looking through all the poems that make up my first collection of poetry and all of a sudden I’m back with the overwhelming nostalgia of pre-University and University life. Maybe this year would be a good time to re-issue the collection into the public after five years of hibernating fermentation.

I am now officially looking for publishers for the electronic and print reissue in America, Europe and in Nigeria. Here, below were the lines I penned for the year 2000, written a few hours into that year while I sat in church on that December evening, bored to my bones.

The Year of the bug

It’s a new dawn because a year is born,
But are hours years for zero to mark one?
Men have flown to realms of high imagination
with anxiety and snippets of loose contrite illusions.
Of human clock, a stroke of the thin long second hand,
Or the gradual droop till the final grain of sand
Marks a whole new start – a thunderous landmark.
And new time commences, yes it remains dark.
Here begins a new dull span of restless days
Of ends unseen, unsure even when one strongly prays.
Called it a new phase, named it a new rolling life –
new day into pay; new life into more human strife.
And yet remains too cryptic and strange remnants
of words, thoughts, fears and imagination parts,
And of pregnant signs, sights and sighs unblown -
of things not yet seen and yet all unknown.

(c) All rights reserved.

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Re-Reading Myself was published on January 1st, 2010, with the tags , , , , , , , under the Art, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

This Step, This Spot – A Poem

For January


And this is life, even as tomorrow crawls in with bright winks

or grim wings across an uncertain sky. Yes, this is the life

for which fore-runners spoke, a day for which mothers’ backs

broke with sweat, and strained in odd old colds of irksome strife…

It is now that beats the heart, with two eyes across a dawning day,

and a flesh hung in space, with rasping sound of black restless keys.

Here it is where hope resides, not afar in the boxed, fuddled past

of rain on concrete cracks. It is not in the exile of many journeys.



This plinth of time must serve as a totem rank to lighten pathways

When the moon falls behind the yellow hills, with a dry Western snore.

This step is new, but like aeons of dreams and returning memories

Is old in the breadth of its pace, much more than just a random chore.

I could ponder hope in blunt alien lands. Still, I will not look behind

But inwards. In its charged spot are the loose ends of moving thoughts,

with each breath a treasury of lore, new paths bearing known marks:

I shall live in a ball of charms which dreams and hopes have wrought.

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This Step, This Spot – A Poem was published on December 28th, 2009, with the tags , under the Art, Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently 4 comments on this article so far.

Rima VII

In the dark corner of the hall,

perhaps forgotten by her mistress,

silent and dusty,

laid the harp.

So many notes slept in her strings,

as the songbird sleeps in the branches,

waiting for the snowy hand

that knows how to awake them!

Alas! – I thought – how often does genius

likewise sleep in the deepest of the heart,

and a voice, like Lazarus, awaits

to be told “Rise and walk!

Poem by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

and Clarissa, my Amigo Secreto.

NOTE: The game ended yesterday.

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Rima VII was published on December 19th, 2009, with the tags , , , under the Art category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

Sisters – Heaviness and Tenderness – You Look The Same

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Wasps and bees both suck the heavy rose.

Man dies, and the hot sand cools again.

Carried off on a black stretcher, yesterday’s sun goes.

Oh, honeycombs’heaviness, nets’ tenderness,

It’s easier to lift a stone than to say your name!

I have one purpose left, a golden purpose,

how, from time’s weight, to free myself again.

I drink the turbid air like a dark water.

The rose was earth; time, ploughed from underneath.

Woven, the heavy, tender roses, in slow vortex,

the roses, heaviness and tenderness, in a double-wreath.

Poem by Osip Mandelshtam, left on my door by my secret friend.

Note: I should perhaps tell you now that s/he has now left me three poems and about five gifts. There was the photo frame, then the class notebook, candy, then some pink scented beans (which first worried me because it felt like a feminine gift :( :D ), and a bottle of peach scented candles. Now I’m totally confused, not necessarily in a bad way. The game ends tomorrow when I should discover who my Amigo Secreto is, and finally make myself known to my own subject. It should be fun. It is taking place at a dinner somewhere in town, organized by the department of foreign languages.

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Sisters – Heaviness and Tenderness – You Look The Same was published on December 17th, 2009, with the tags , , , under the Art, Fun, adventures category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

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