Fair maiden of Ogbor
A raft of green-tingled lashes
I watched you drink from the cup of tattered dreams,
And nibble at the food prepared for fallen clouds.
Your clay-pot contained red tears of doleful faces
As you treaded on sun-baked earth, towards Mmiri Umuagwu.
That day, you walked bare-footed on cactus
Working tirelessly on thorns, to gather a million oranges into a legion of leaking baskets.
When you stooped to feed your thirst,
You heard whips louder than the gongs of Amauzari.
You bled water and blood into the day’s womb,
And re-birthed them at night, in an hospital of painful solitude.
Fair maiden of Ogbor
Adaugo with beads of sun rays decorated at the waist and ankles,
Feeding music to the hungry ears of earth.
Tatakowa told me the sun is the sexiest in the universe;
That maidens are suns in gods’ huts;
That Amadioha thundercracks are appraisal for your cosseting the day with circumcised rays.
At the gurgle of your heritage, all feet hacken to sinking sand.
Your magnet of eroticism is not lying bare like a sick prince on a royal mat.
It has charmed my wandering soul, to the nest weaved by the godly hands of fate.
There, we shall hear cockcrows, hooted by knightly beaks of the night
And be lurked under watchful eyes of the moon and his kinsmen,
Sipping fresh palmwine from calabash of the gods,
And holding scepters of dysphoria, spurting claps of sweets, not sorrows.
Fair maiden of Ogbor
The tails of the dawn are wagging to receive the caress of your eternal hands.
Come, for I’ve cooked a stage at the Igwe’s palace,
And hired the ancestral singers of our heavens, with the drummers of Amadioha for you
To commune your soul with the dances of the gods
For your troubles are buried in the soils of memory,
And your joys, sprouted from the uterus of a new moon.
Adaugo,
Never again shall you be treated to a delicacy of villenage
For me and the gods are at your threshold
And the bearers of El Dorado at your beck and call!
meet the poet: Ezebuike Temple
