One Poem

Jebba Blues
(2025)

God’s hand, if anything, is liquid.
We Africans know it as
holy strokes of cirrus sky,
know it as the gushing veins of the Niger,
know it as Mother’s milk upon cradle.
That is why we survived the first flood,
although Europeans failed to record that
even for all their factory of paper mills.

The world before the rain
were ghost steamers ploughing the reeves
and the coral base of our history
for a thirst unknown. Boatloads of plunder
anchored at the shores of the natives–
I know that from the silence of the periodicals
and shells left at the bank. 
Today is the day of home rodents
not beavers irrigating the delta, 
and down the stream is a gully 
filled with dead characins.

I have let go of my goal, my dream
of becoming a rainmaker.
In this thrumming humility of sorrow, 
our proof that the border villages 
of the world are overflowing with grief
is that the strange spirits patrol the delta,
and shadows sinking battered by May deluge. 
For all the aquatic vows I have made
to my father’s water pedigree,
I can never get used to this river’s anger
nor to my country’s song of grief.