Three Poems

By Tares Oburumu

i

glory to lagos

my grace is this phenobarbital;                     this cross i have devised from the handrails of the yellow

Omnibus

                                                                                                           & the pidgin they speak. 

this wild fascination is  heavy on me,         as it’s with you.           you drowning in the familiar crowd,

head up in the same faith we all carry in a pouch, 

unafraid to die close to a box full of luxury. i dream many dreams about  you,    you my love, my life

& sleepless times.   you, helping me carry this crucifixion with these lights,                   these abecedarian

 lights

in my hands,                                                                                    to write the dead hafiz

out of the curls of blue roses of the mediterranean sea to the islands’ green.        he was searching 

for whatever was called father, as i am, 

heavenly father.  

                            father being the love of everything far away from home. 

in finima town     the word father, sometimes, is made water,         & its shapeless silk of colorless habit

is made word.                     but i go lustral,            i illuminate the sea,                                  writing letters of

my unhappy days to an ocean of brothers

where you are a wave,       an arc – a crescent, bent over the night,        happiness & sorrow;        the dirt

we make a country for,                                    a brand of the old colony.                                      i finally find

 you,

quite British

in a sugar factory   far from home         – home -       you say,          is where they break bread & pour wine

 enough

to keep holy        the biographies we live.      here,                   holy is the man who survives his own body.

holy                     is the one who preaches diaspora in the name of the Lord,         God      Lugard.

here,   i found out    that  a shed of  sweetness shelters you:                          the honey in your opinions,

the contralto stuffing your tongue with audience,               the basil in your voice. 

yet you sing off the roots.

i wait at that post-colonial English door, listening for an opening        as the hours pass          brilliantly by,

wondering what brought you this far.     is it debt?     let  the money pray for us.         sin?  i will sing,

i will sing an emo for  the government.

                                                                                             if it is the color of the villages in me,

then glory be to the yellow buses.                                                                                 glory be to exodus.

                                                                                  

ii

first glory – a shape of music

isn’t this love,    that i love  to walk into leavings     before i burn?            goodbye, night,

                                                                                                           she says to the garden

                                                                                                                                                             Set ablaze

by its own flowers,

as the microbus pulls up to motif.      my little girl & sister, & i , trembling out             of what

the green flag stands for   to a field of water.                 behind us, these questions go up in flames:

me,  bent – grass-deep beneath the green flag.   me, bent -  before a map as i do before my mirrors

looking to see if i am from a nation close to extinction.  me, bent – in the middle of a house

infested with windows.

through their stereos        exits              i see  the light                                                the music,

white smoke,                      spreads its notes as ink over the city               -  inhale symphony –

then breathe, which is to say write. writing is the only way out,          out of an amphitheater burning,

the only door open        wild open                     in a closed country.              there’s no song

of the vineyard of  ruin i can sing for you but this         this,               only this;  

across the borders, i am a field of stars. step inside the chorus

leafing through my arms      to the orchestra where we have come to,              the pre-colonial communists 

still fishing, like the blue sea’s  addicts, in a dead precolonial time. 

step inside the music.           & pray it is home,            with bowls of piney lakes built around it,

for everything that burns.       for everything that stays                                       shapeless,

is the glory of water.          & then you open my hand,         fill its map with harbors for the boats

rowing to reach our salvation             the lone town  of finima.   we arrive at the Grand piano in the year

 of our lord Jesus Christ,

                                                                                                       which is the riverbank.

you,          keeping to the G major,                   i, raising a pitch to survive the song

                                                                                we are played. 

                                                                                  

iii

reading doors

having keys is not enough. the house is a chapter 

written in small fonts. i squint hard to look at the rooms in the distance 

through the keyhole; each expanding  with one color 

& camera, sepia & telescope rising in rays different 

from all i have known, all i have got from the child i was. 

i cut through the letters & merge with the 

paintings to look into the colors of my being; there’s 

a blue room somewhere in a calendar, the date reveals

its weather shot with tiny arrows of water & the portrait 

of someone that died long ago becomes clearer, readable 

as i wipe with a paintbrush the window facing the class.

it’s the  ghost of my teacher hung heavily from wall to wall.

two plastic chairs broken for the child, a table improvised 

gor the dead, a candlelight at war with the wind shaking 

my inverted memories off light, a cup of coffee & a box 

gor grammar, a pen to remember what’s past & a notebook 

for what will come after what i become makes  the rooms

 a city. the night is an uninhabited planet, it wears off names 

of places with its dark garment of art. i pour into my bones 

the dark coffee & become transparent, visible to the night.

o read my life in large volumes, turning people over places, places

over hills, until i become the room’s geography. after dawn, i walk

on marbles into sunrays the doors, they stand  before me 

in great numbers, each is a word for vision. i open transcendence

again, stare at the child until a boy grows from it & walks

into the long distance; the promise of a new house with old British doors 

fixed to letters with hinges opening & closing my life, day & night. 

                                               

Tares Oburumu is a lover of God and his daughter, Sasha. He writes from 25 kilometers away from Warri. His works have appeared on Connotation press, Bluepepper, Icefloes, The Agonist, Afapinen, Praxis ,Juke, Woven Tales, Kalahari, Africanwriter, Afrocritik, Expound, Nantygreens, and elsewhere.