ktravula – a travelogue!

Written Over Luxembourg

Dawn wafts in at a distance –

a crimson glow amidst the cloud

like mounds of angry smoke.

We float above a cumulus, with

old empires wasting beneath

the loaves of precipitations.

The child in me always

believed that angels lived here

up in the shining layers of the sky.

But now, black heft of crowded soot

hang there in shapes of gnomes

as our wing extends into a distance.

We remain a bump in the sky

trapped in man’s reckless bet

against wind and gravity.

In this cubicle, this window view

into a waking world

there is no silver lining, except us,

far above everyone else.

Defying the sky,

I am here as this daylight begins.

Kitengela Nights

(Kenya, 2005)

Kitengela nights, a freedom flight.

Dry wisps of grass fly by, breaking

with the cold wind of a pregnant night

as harmattan singes the flesh and mind,

lungs dotted with dust and rust.

Nairobi evening. Lights, cold,

And love – ugali and roasted meat,

Nyama choma, in the walled hub

Of a distant home from home:

Then, warmth in the eastern country.

April winds break across my face

in the bust of a fast-moving beast.

We were four – and a few more,

Strangers in a foreign land, alone.

Only love moved, hosted, filled us.

Now, the mind journeys back

In soft bytes of soothing moods:

dark, homely evening, Kenyan tropics.

Rain and home in a distant place.

Kitengela, you live across from me.

For Subsideen the Gnome

Shigidi – a cursed African gnome – lay spread in an acid rain

bedraggled to the teeth, to the last hair on its wiggling tail.

Across from the junction where it lay in the throes of pain

are the broken bones of toothless men, skulls, splintered shale.

Little kids pace around with hands across their nose, disgust –

the ugly bastard once ruled the night like a fierce, rabid skunk.

They kick him around now with the dung around its wooden bust,

and laugh in the rain to mothers’ delight. Old men play drunk.

The year began a dream – country luck hanging on a bilious rock;

a finger in the eye of the poor, struggling village. A buyover man.

A silver spoon flashes here in the light. This time a non-shod shock

rips through an angry country, silence morphing into a flash-pan.

Red eyes cohere and all that remains are burnt remnants of tare

as rain clears out painful drains. Shigidi withers into its nightmare.

Occupation Blues

Open window peers into a blue evening through tiny louvre slits,

removed, it seems, from floods around the Nile and the Hudson,

Mississippi, Missouri and Victoria and other throbbing tributaries.

Open veins of revolt, serrated slivers of soul across the landscape

as far as eyes could see: a finger in the pupil of the surly present.

“Occupy this,” morning calls, blue with equal promises of dawn.

With Love from Toto

With Love from my Toto*

Did they not chook** me with their cacti

and fill me with bilious waste – those

whose scrota should be jaundiced with

stings from wayward bees?

Did they not claw me with callous talons

and grip my vexing veins – those

whose hands will remain guests

to rheumatoid rust?

Did they not mock my wailings

and cause my teeth to gnash – those

whose nights should witness

harmonies of terrors and bitterness?

Did they not defile my thighs

and maul my breasts – those

whose paths will forever

quake with anguish?

Did they not tear me apart

and watch my navel suffocate – those

who should be bobittised with blunt scalpels?

Some pricks should be snacks for hungry hyenas.

poem by Chris Ogunlowo ***

_____________________

* Nigerian Pidgin for vagina.

* * The equivalent of fuck in Nigerian Pidgin English, usually used to exaggerate coital thrust.

*** Written in response to the recent infamous rape case that went viral in Nigeria last week. Chris is a Nigerian blogger and copywriter.

« Older Entries Newer Entries »

...or browse articles by tags