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| Credit: Sam's Existential |
Three Poems
by Osahon Oka
Life is a festival
The river sings
to the drunk & dizzy
& that is enough hot drink
for any head to take.
I take hold of schizophrenic dreams
& suck it in until smoke
forms from my insomnia
& watch inertia crow
out of my addled veins.
I'm the child of harmattan
bush fires,
says the dust devil
to its shadow—
let us dance
like failed brakes
on the tongue
of this parched sun.
I'm not the shadow
of your restless dance,
I say,
loosened like ripe breasts.
I've fondled
the tart,
swollen dusk;
I've danced
the devil's dance
longing for heaven
& eaten from his bitter song.
Alone,
I've caressed
& held myself adrift & aloft
like a river flame
until the dance
spurted out of me,
wet & spent
like a gutted wave.
Is your bush as charred
as this crippled tongue?
The messenger out of the sea
I too was born in the burning,
mirage, the water of my breath.
Branch was holy ash
on the forehead of the wind
& spat out of there a stained vestment,
birds grew ominous in their fractured distance.
Pyre was my mountain top
where vespers sang:
the broken turntable of my mother.
She, the firebrand preacher of elements,
pulled me out by the molten char
of my metal plated soul.
What warped seed!
A holy thing & yellow,
I rose among the ascending disorders
& floated among their shrivelled skin.
Among them, I was no one;
just another messenger,
a beautiful rendition of ruin.
I was not the first born nor the last.
Mother held them all in a rib cage
of screeching metal anguish,
fragments so cold, they gleamed
with brutal eyes at the orange world.
But I also saw the glimmer
when the wind pulled away,
unfurling the wings of smoke
from our mighty horse.
It carried us high into the foliage
among the singing of angels & hinges.
We burned as we flowered
& I, yet aflame with the passion
kiss of my mother's flung arms,
reached for their blunt reality.
& the wind caught the spark,
lifted it from its hammering heart
& we rose together, unlatched
mast, into the rainbow sleek sheen
of the dumb sea where untold fishes
bejewelled the waters with their dreamy eyes.
& in that sudden catatonia,
I saw a vast ship of purple
& on its helm, her fire so holy
it had no beat, the moon:
charred, pockmarked & bald.
Her glory felt like cold bone
so I fled, slammed back among embers,
already worn to the dark empty dress
of steel stumps— home,
a crowded stench— my family gone,
their terrible work done.
Dachau
Cheeks
of a thousand echoes,
gradually hunger recesses.
Eye pits
& here,
the skeletal temple.
Wings of brilliant iris
swallows
the marble lamp
sloping into cobwebbed ruin.
Flattened muzzle
of pistol butt
broken teeth
with lips of roe—
pale, crimson limp—
the inner bark of anguish
opens your fragile mask—
witness to fingers
that play
the harmonies
filling the feverish air
of hell.
& here,
solitary humanoid,
humbled
& scalped open,
your corroded undertow.
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| Osahon Oka |
Osahon Oka is a Nigerian of Bini/Kwale extraction. He is one of the winners of the Visual Verse Autumn Writing Prize 2022 and has not only made the long list of the Erbacce Poetry Prize but has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology. All of the above aside, he has writing up on PoetryColumnND, PepperCoast Lit, Ibadan Art, Wild Pine, Down River Road Review and elsewhere. He can be reached on Twitter @onyemazua7735. He writes from Benin City.
