Remi Raji
Remi Raji Poems
Tonight my verse will find you dancing alone
a hurricane of desires will pass me, unknown.
And I the anchor, martyr to your trance,
draped, in the absolution of your absence.
...
As sure as the deceptive day
you're the only cell in my stem
the stomata of unending songs,...
...
when the locusts come, will you greet them
with tears and blood, in the aftermath of fractured years?
when the termites come with fangs of iron
can you be the grit stubbornness of rocks?
...
I
Sometimes a man gets tired of going to sea as now
when the voices I hear speak nothing but shame, and silence.
When the calabash goes to the river and never returns
The carver is drenched in tears, the drinker is famished.
...
no water runs where the Niger flows
no fish swims where the Benue berths
my spirit is grieved, my grief is long like the rivers
i will not forgive i will not forget
...
I come gently
Like the evening rain
I come in silence
Like the dews of a virgin morn
...
But as it was in the beginning...
We have long been lost to the substance of things
We have long sought the shadow of the masquerader
And we puke in pride and laziness.
...
Trapped, double-trapped, triple-trapped
I feel the outlaw's pain
I know the anguish of exile
...
And suddenly my land becomes a bride again
In this memory of decimals
You're a soulful, full-bodied number
the even envy of oddities...
...
I will like to turn you inside out and step into your skin
To be, that sober shadow in the mirror of indifference
Look at me, slowly, behold the irises wherein you hide
Wherein lies the ultrasound of hidden bleeding images
...
Remi Raji Biography
Remi Raji is the pen name of Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, a Nigerian poet, scholar, literary organiser and cultural activist. Raji’s first collection of poems – A Harvest of Laughters (1997) – has won national and international recognition. A Salzburg Fellow and visiting professor and writer to a number of institutions including Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, Universities of California at Riverside and Irvine (all U.S.A.), University of Cape Town (South Africa), and Cambridge University (UK), Raji’s scholarly essays have appeared in journals including Research in African Literatures and African Literature Today. Raji has presented his poems in Africa, Europe and America. In 2005, he served as the Guest Writer to the City of Stockholm (Sweden). Raji’s works have been translated into French, German, Catalan, Swedish, Ukrainian and Latvian. He has been an “Alexander von Humboldt”-Scholar to the Humboldt University to Berlin (Germany).)
The Best Poem Of Remi Raji
I will find you
Tonight my verse will find you dancing alone
a hurricane of desires will pass me, unknown.
And I the anchor, martyr to your trance,
draped, in the absolution of your absence.
You for whom I have wandered in uncertain pines
You for whom I have sacrificed my limbs in open mines.
You for whom I have many names...
What delights me more this very moment:
your laughter, salty as the rain's chemistry
on a parched tongue, or your seismic filament,
which gives fulness to your minted mystery.
Tonight my verse seeks you but I'm a speck of dream.
In the middle of it all, when you are not there
I always find you in the finesse of sand
in the sounds of stones, rivers, and in the clouds' jeer
in the waves, in the foams and dunes of the land.
We will not know the day but the hour will come
in the hurricane and the dance
in the liberty of the trance
in this serration
and that imagination
all mean less than the remembrance of fire.
It is in that hour that my verse will find you
It is in that second that my song will fill you.
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