Collected Poems Read online

  Is betrayed in his shrine by empty men

  Suborned with the stranger's tawdry gifts

  And taken trussed up to the altar-shrine turned

  Slaughterhouse for the gory advent

  Feast of an errant cannibal god

  Tooth-filed to eat his fellows.

  And the sky recedes in

  Disgust; the orphan snake

  Abandoned weeps in the shadows.

  Their Idiot Song

  These fellows, the old pagan

  said, surely are out of their mind—

  that old proudly impervious

  derelict skirted long ago by floodwaters

  of salvation: Behold the great

  and gory handiwork of Death displayed

  for all on dazzling sheets this

  hour of day its twin nostrils

  plugged firmly with stoppers of wool

  and they ask of him: Where

  is thy sting?

  Sing on, good fellows, sing

  on! Someday when it is you

  he decks out on his great

  iron bed with cotton wool

  for your breath, his massing odors

  mocking your pitiful makeshift defenses

  of face powder and township ladies' lascivious

  scent, these others roaming

  yet his roomy chicken coop will

  be singing and asking still

  but YOU by then

  no longer will be

  in doubt!

  The Nigerian Census

  I will not mourn with you

  your lost populations, the silent columns

  of your fief erased

  from the king's book of numbers

  For in your house of stone

  by the great road

  you listened once to refugee voices

  at dawn telling of massacres and plagues

  in their land across seven rivers

  Like a hornbill in flight

  you tucked in your slippered feet

  from the threshold

  out of their beseeching gaze

  But pestilence farther

  than faraway tales of dawn

  had bought a seat in Ogun's reckless

  chariot and knocks by nightfall

  on your iron gate.

  Take heart oh chief; decimation

  by miscount, however grievous,

  is a happy retreat from bolder

  uses of the past. Take heart,

  for these scribal flourishes

  behind smudged entries, these

  trophied returns of clerical headhunters

  can never match the quiet flow

  of red blood.

  But if my grudging comfort fail,

  then take this long and even view to A.D. 2010

  when the word is due to go out again

  and—depending on which Caesar

  orders the count—new conurbations

  may sprout in today's wastelands,

  and thriving cities dissolve

  in sudden mirages

  and the ready-reckoners at court

  will calculate their gain

  and our loss, and make us

  any-number-of-million-they-like strong!

  Flying

  (for Niyi Osundare)

  Something in altitude kindles power-thirst

  Mere horse-height suffices the emir

  Bestowing from rich folds of prodigious turban

  Upon crawling peasants in the dust

  Rare imperceptible nods enwrapped

  In princely boredom.

  I too have known

  A parching of that primordial palate,

  A quickening to manifest life

  Of a long recessive appetite.

  Though strapped and manacled

  That day I commanded from the pinnacle

  Of a three-tiered world a bridge befitting

  The proud deranged deity I had become.

  A magic rug of rushing clouds

  Billowed and rubbed its white softness

  Like practiced houri fingers on my sole

  And through filters of its gauzy fabric

  Revealed wonders of a metropolis

  Magic-struck to fairyland proportions.

  By different adjustments of vision

  I caused the clouds to float

  Over a stilled landscape, over towers

  And masts and smoke-plumed chimneys;

  Or turned the very earth, unleashed

  From itself, a roaming fugitive

  Beneath a constant sky Then came

  A sudden brightness over the world,

  A rare winter's smile it was, and printed

  On my cloud carpet a black cross

  Set in an orb of rainbows. To which

  Splendid nativity came—who else would come

  But gray unsporting Reason, faithless

  Pedant offering a bald refractory annunciation?

  But oh what beauty! What speed!

  A chariot of night in panic flight

  From Our Royal Proclamation of the rites

  Of day! And riding out Our procession

  Of fantasy We slaked an ancient

  Vestigial greed shriveled by ages of dormancy

  Till the eyes exhausted by glorious pageantries

  Returned to rest on that puny

  Legend of the life jacket stowed away

  Of all places under my seat.

  Now I think I know why gods

  Are so partial to heights—to mountain

  Tops and spires, to proud iroko trees

  And thorn-guarded holy bombax,

  Why petty household divinities

  Will sooner perch on a rude board

  Strung precariously from brittle rafters

  Of a thatched roof than sit squarely

  On safe earth.

  Epilogue

  He Loves Me; He Loves Me Not

  “Harold Wilson he loves

  me he gave me

  a gun in my time

  of need to shoot

  my rebellious brother. Edward

  Heath he loves

  me not he's promised a gun

  to his sharpshooting

  brother viewing me

  crazily through ramparts

  of white Pretoria…. It

  would be awful

  if he got me.” It was

  awful and he got

  him. They headlined it

  on the BBC spreading

  indignation through the

  world, later that day

  in emergency meeting his

  good friend Wilson and Heath

  his enemy crossed swords

  over him at Westminster

  and sent posthaste Sir Alec to Africa

  for the funeral.

  Dereliction

  I quit the carved stool

  in my father's hut to the swelling

  chant of saber-tooth termites

  raising in the pith of its wood

  a white-bellied stalagmite

  Where does a runner go

  whose oily grip drops

  the baton handed by the faithful one

  in a hard, merciless race? Or

  the priestly elder who barters

  for the curio collector's head

  of tobacco the holy staff

  of his people?

  Let them try the land

  where the sea retreats

  Let them try the land

  where the sea retreats

  We Laughed at Him

  We laughed at him our

  hungry-eyed fool-man with itching

  fingers who would see farther

  than all. We called him

  visionary missionary revolutionary

  and, you know, all the other

  naries that plague the peace, but

  nothing would deter him.

  With his own nails he cut

  his eyes, scraped the crust

>   over them peeled off his priceless

  patina of rest and the dormant

  fury of his dammed pond

  broke into a cataract

  of blood tumbling down

  his face and chest…. We

  laughed at his screams the fool-man

  who would see what eyes

  are forbidden, the hungry-eyed

  man, the look-look man, the

  itching man bent to drag

  into daylight fearful signs

  hidden away for our safety

  at the creation of the world.

  He was always against

  blindness, you know, our quiet

  sober blindness, our lazy—he called

  it—blindness. And for

  his pains? A turbulent, torrential

  cascading blindness behind

  a Congo river of blood. He sat

  backstage then behind his flaming red

  curtain and groaned in

  the pain his fingers unlocked, in the

  rainstorm of blows loosed on his head

  by the wild avenging demons he

  drummed free from the silence of their

  drum-house, his prize for big-eyed greed.

  We sought by laughter to drown

  his anguish until one day

  at height of noon his screams

  turned suddenly to hymns

  of ecstasy. We knew then his pain

  had risen to the brain

  and we took pity on him

  the poor fool-man as he held

  converse with himself. My Lord,

  we heard him say to the curtain

  of his blood I come to touch

  the hem of your crimson robe.

  He went stark mad thereafter

  raving about new sights he

  claimed to see, poor fellow; sights

  you and I know are as impossible for this world

  to show as for a hen to urinate—if one

  may borrow one of his many crazy vulgarisms—

  he raved about trees topped with

  green and birds flying—yes actually

  flying through the air—about

  the Sun and the Moon and stars

  and about lizards crawling on all

  fours…. But nobody worries much

  about him today; he has paid

  his price and we don't even

  bother to laugh anymore.

  Mango Seedling

  LINE 14: the widow of infinite faith refers to the story of the widow of Sarephath in the First Book of Kings, chapter 17.

  LINE 18: Old Tortoise's miraculous feast: Once upon a time Tortoise went to work for an old woman, and at the end of his labors she set before him a bowl containing a lone cocoyam sitting on a mound of cooked green leaves. Naturally, Tortoise protested vehemently and refused to touch such a meager meal. In the end, however, he was persuaded, still protesting, to give it a try. Then he discovered to his amazement (and nearly his undoing) that another cocoyam always appeared in the bowl as soon as he ate the previous one.

  LINE 24: the primordial quarrel of Earth and Sky: This was a dispute over who was sovereign. It led finally to Sky's withholding of rain for seven whole years, until the ground became hard as iron and the dead could not be buried. Only then did Earth sue for peace, sending high-flying Vulture as emissary.

  Christmas in Biafra (1969)

  LINE 30: new aluminum coins: A completely unsuccessful effort was made in Biafra to peg galloping prices by introducing new coins of a lower denomination than the paper money that had come in earlier. But it was too late. The market, having already settled for the five-shilling currency note as its smallest medium of exchange, paid no heed to the new coins.

  An “If” of History

  LINE 5: A Japanese general named Tomayuki Yamashita was hanged by the Americans at the end of the Second World War for war crimes committed by troops under his nominal command in the Philippines.

  Remembrance Day

  The Igbo people around my hometown, Ogidi, had an annual observance called Oso Nwanadi. On the night preceding it, all able-bodied men in the village took flight and went into hiding in neighboring villages in order to escape the ire of Nwanadi or dead kindred killed in war.

  Although the Igbo people admire courage and valor they do not glamorize death, least of all death in battle. They have no Valhalla concept; the dead hero bears the living a grudge. Life is the “natural” state; death is tolerable only when it leads again to life—to reincarnation. Two sayings of the Igbo will illustrate their attitude toward death:

  A person who cries because he is sick, what will they do who are dead?

  Before a dead man is reincarnated an emaciated man will recover his flesh.

  A Wake for Okigbo

  This poem is an elaboration of a traditional Igbo dirge.

  In some parts of Igbo land the death of a young person was first publicized by members of his or her age grade chanting through the village in a make-believe search for their missing comrade, who they insisted was only playing hide-and-seek with them.

  The refrain of their chant, nzomalizo, is made up of zo, which means hide, and mali, which is a playful sound. The repeat of zo and the linking mali complete the effect of hiding in play. Ugboko is the personification of the tropical forest, while Iyi personifies the stream. Ogbonuke is the embodiment of ill will and catastrophe.

  Love Song (for Anna)

  LINE 8: Leaves of cocoyam come in handy for wrapping small and delicate things. For instance, before storage, kola nuts are wrapped in cocoyam leaves to preserve them from desiccation. However, cocoyam leaves are not for rough handling as Vulture learned to his cost when he received from the hands of an appeased Sky a bundle of rain wrapped in them to take home to drought-stricken Earth.

  Beware, Soul Brother

  LINE 10: abia drums beaten at the funeral of an Igbo titled man. The dance itself is also called abia and is danced by the dead man's peers while he lies in state and finally by two men bearing his coffin before it is taken for burial; so he goes to his ancestors by a final rite de passage in solemn paces of dance.

  Misunderstanding

  The Igbo people have a firm belief in the duality of things. Nothing is by itself, nothing is absolute. “I am the way, the Truth, and the Life” would be meaningless in Igbo theology. They say that a man may be right by Udo and yet be killed by Ogwugwu; in other words, he may worship one god to perfection and yet fall foul of another.

  Igbo proverbs bring out this duality of existence very well. Take any proverb that puts forward a point of view or a “truth” and you can always find another that contradicts it or at least puts a limitation on the absoluteness of its validity.

  Lazarus

  LINE 12: Ogbaku: Many years ago a strange and terrible thing happened in the small village of Ogbaku. A lawyer driving on the highway that passes by that village ran over a man. The villagers, thinking the man had been killed, set upon the lawyer and clubbed him to death. Then to their horror, their man began to stir. So, the story went, they set upon him too and finished him off, saying, “You can't come back having made us do that.”

  Those Gods Are Children

  The attitude of Igbo people to their gods is sometimes ambivalent. This arises from a worldview that sees the land of the spirits as a territorial extension of the human domain. Each sphere has its functions as well as its privileges in relation to the other. Thus a man is not entirely without authority in dealing with the spirit world nor entirely at its mercy. The deified spirits of his ancestors look after his welfare; in return he regularly offers them sustenance in the form of sacrifice. In such a reciprocal relationship one is encouraged (within reason) to try to get the better of the bargain.

  Lament of the Sacred Python

  LINE 10: acknowledged my face in broken dirges: One of the songs that accompany the dead to the burial place at nightfall has these lines:

  Look a python! Look a python!


  Python lies across the way!

  LINE 24: creation's day of gifts: We all choose our gifts, our character, our fate from the Creator just before we make our journey into the world. The sacred python did not choose (like some other snakes) the terror of the fang and venom, and yet it received a presence more overpowering than theirs.

  Their Idiot Song

  The Christian claim of victory over death, is to the unconverted villager, one of the really puzzling things about the faith. Are these Christians just naive or plain hypocritical?

  He Loves Me; He Loves Me Not

  Lines provoked by the news that a street in the Nigerian city of Port Harcourt had been named after Britain's prime minister Harold Wilson.

  Dereliction

  This poem is in three short movements. The first is the inquirer (onye ajuju); the second, the mediating diviner (dibia), who frames the inquiry in general terms; and the third is the Oracle.

  We Laughed at Him

  LINE 36: wild avenging demons: This refers to the story of Tortoise and the miraculous food drum offered him in spirit land in compensation for his palm nut that one of the spirit children has eaten. After long use (and misuse) the drum ceases to produce any more feasts when it is beaten. Whereupon Tortoise blatantly contrives a reenactment of his first visit to spirit land. But this time the spirits (fully aware, no doubt, of his greed) take him to a long row of hanging drums and allow him to pick one for himself. As you would expect, he picks the largest and lumbers away under its great weight. Home at last, he makes elaborate arrangements for a feast and then beats the drum. No food comes; instead demons armed with long whips emerge and belabor him to their satisfaction.

  The element of choice is a recurrent theme in Igbo folklore, especially in man's dealings with the spirit world. We are not forced; we make a free choice.

  AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, AUGUST 2004

  Copyright © 1971, 1973, 2004 by Chinua Achebe

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States