In The Unmeasured Womb Poem by Sofiul Azam

Not that I'm alone on the run, up on erroneous deck,
the etymologist that I am always finds grief in places
redolent of loons' lore, of blames for us emissaries
swotting and knotting blunders of cartography.

No, I cannot hide, nor ever wish to, that I stink
of the spicy East of cloves and cinnamon,
and thrill at apes' startled cries and all that bluster
a lot from claimants' clan in the voyaging West.

I should be miles far from the feel of a Faustus,
for I know the ideas I live on as diet or the clatters
as in a steel-factory I hear instead of sonatas,
and the curt replies of the malicious I meet

more often in paths and plains cut like blades.
Along the way of a lie, fecundity, I feel it's nobody
that I may ever turn out to be but a Vates
in the tropics, finding plans set in the West -

a Gorgon's embodiment of wise-writhing serpents
and all that stony stare; and nothing's easy carried,
not even the rhetoric of her secrets mastered up
like an enchanted whoring after her for long.

Yes, no tide ever turns in the rivers of my blood.
I'm left to wonder what sort of unease I sprinkle
upon my crisp roots, and how long I will be tasting
riddles so weighty on the twisted tongue.

Yet, I see in the mind's eye a bit of an apocalypse -
a little ease at last with home the tangle of nets
to hold me back from flying into another darker sky
or to keep me sheltered in its unmeasured womb.

Oh, how longer will I be calm in that slimy cote?


Note: Vates is a Latin word which the Roman people used in the sense of a poet, a diviner as well.


from IN LOVE WITH A GORGON (2010)