The Man Who First Saw My Nakedness Poem by Tony Adah

I am the one you saw behind
My mother's backyard yelling
On my cradle of banana leaves
Smeared in my post-partum fluids
Helpless.
Not in the know of what is under the sun
Ignorant of cradle to grave
Still i am a bird of passage
To where?
I do not know.

When I saw you eating stale food
In my mother's hut staring at me
I knew not you
Than your exalted stares
Over the young man
Whose nakedness you saw
With your naked eyes.
What tilted your way here?
My mother's luscious soups?
So at least I thought!

Each time you gulped a lump of foo-foo
And gave me your otiose stares,
I took my eyes away like a bashful new wife.
I wonder why you wandered here!
But my mother told me why.
When someone called you
Near my mother, s hut
I gladly answered
Thinking I was the one.
And this is the way it
Between you and I
Without our name tags.