Chima Ononogbu

Oh you South Africans, the black natives!
You once bled the blood of apartheid,
Drank the rage of renegades traversing your mountains,
You rebuked your humanity that you may calm their vexed eyes.
...

That night, in a dream,
I found myself on a hill's skull
overlooking a quiet, dimly remembered, hamlet
hemmed by untrod expanse of sprightly vegetation
...

We're mere sojourners in life's great plains,
which they say isn't a bed of roses;
therefore I surmise it's a bed of thorns,
because life is either one or the other.
...

In those earliest happy days,
when life at its freshest,
a spirited lad I really was; so innocent, so angelic maybe,
always in my father's loving arms cradled,
...

In my search, the sage told me:
When rails sparkle their brightest,
The stars in my abode shall descend,
And pleasant air the sacred oak shall blow,
...

Why should anyone die?
Why, therefore, death? Leaving this life and going
to the abode whereby souls grow deaf, more deaf
than a tree that runs not, even when a saw yells death from afar.
...

Oppression everywhere; people scurrying,
scurrying away from a lunatic,
a dragon-mouthed lunatic drunk from a cocktail of blood.
No one is safe;
...

I'm a dove with a face of a hulk,
But you think wrong of me!

You think of me a little too cocky, contumacious;
...

And yes, I know, really well,
that life is a bridge between quicksand and deep sea.

I know its temperament like I know the face of the moon.
...

In the sky
Lies my dream,
Where among the stars,
It watches and beckons on me.
...

Living is a plaything,
a daily exercise with exception of perfection,
rather a falling and a rising
as everyday closer and closer to its end we gallop.
...

I know of a people abandoned,
whose dusk never turns to dawn,
light has refused to flush away their nights,
so their lives are lived in the hours of an owl;
...

I've been meaning to ask you these questions, my creator,
which I've harbored in my mind
ever since my entrance into this mortal enclave,
but over the years, toiling for days on end
...

A dull evening in my hilly hearted village,
a time when squirrels dance up the lower heavens;
Children faces ballooned in boisterous borderless smiles,
looking forward to the entrancing moonlight tales.
...

Black South Africans,
You have become tactless
although history rebukes you
but with yarn tinged with blood
...

Many years ago
on those scabrous trees
on their lankiest branches, I usually sat
in the earliest rising of my voyage
...

On this canvas,
I wish to paint a life -
the thin line between rich and poor -
which wakes up in rope purple,
...

On the edge of their greying house,
He sat, the starved lonely boy,
Humming his native songs,
Which he learned from the good old birds
...

At first, it was a grain smaller than a mustard seed,
Then we sowed it
Deep into the ground of our hearts;
It germinated, budded out,
...

Turn not
Your back
On the mirror
Before turning to another.
...