The prize was delivered with all its black image and intent:
a child’s garbled skull, buried in the rubble
of what yesterday was home
Sunset was beautiful over West of Mines,
It could be foggy at Anglo-Jos this time of the year,
but we will not relish such borderline pleasures now, our procession
of bones yodels, backward to the kiln of vivisection
To write this is to walk the abattoir of belief,
to awaken the intemperate ardour of listening to easy breathing
of skull carriers, to remember those whose feet had failed,
ravaged in familiar darkness held in ill-accented autos-da-fe
I know you too wake up in the morning, fevered with darkness in the headlines,
hearing only the sorrowful stutter of that name repeated
with strange tongues of newscasters, a wrench of mono-syllabic stab…
So, can we ever remember the exact moment when we learnt
that a prayer had different names, or that a city, like a myth,
was a code too easily broken?
Sir, to write this is to whistle on the left side of the fade,
to resist the white embrace of forgetfulness, to feel in the umbilical
rot of a wagered earth for the echo of love’s failure
Still there is always the perfect grit on the road,
perhaps your own war of fusion, knowing the world cannot recoil
enough; perhaps, too, the city’s own grave grace, limping its devastation along
in a spreading plateau of surly mines.
