How My Father Survived the War

My father fought on the war front with his bare hands;
his arms were guns and bayonets,
his fingers were bullets,
his teeth were the swords he used,
when the fight became too physical,
and he came into contact with the enemy soldiers.
But my father was small of stature.
His friends were dying as ants squashed to pudding
under the heavy boots of the enemy,
and every day my father feared for his life,
every day he wrote his will and prepared to die.
Sometimes he wrote to my mother, saying,
Today, I'm preparing to die on the battlefield.
He died a thousand times before he returned home.
One day, he was writing one of such letters
when his commander caught him in his room.
He ordered him to lie in the middle of the compound,
where the other soldiers would watch him in the sun,
to shame and disgrace him, on the first day of Harmattan.
On his way to the place of shame, he saw a loaf
and knelt to pick it up; he was famished.
All eyes turned on him with laughter,
as if a panful of gravel descended on his head.
He broke the bread and prepared to eat it,
but his eyes turned cold, his mouth hung,
a long stream of saliva dripped from his mouth,
and he threw it away, far from him, with a shriek.
The harsh wind of the Harmattan licked his face.
The loaf of bread was smeared with blood.
He felt horror and emptiness, angry and revolted.
He knew that his friends had abandoned him.
The loaf was a dirty and horrible trap.
My father felt his body enlarging like a river,
surging towards the area commander like a wave.
He punched him on the face, his fist a steel.
The man spluttered, fell on his face and ate dust.
My father was suspended from the army.
Three days later, the enemy ambushed his troop,
killed all his colleagues in one swoop.
My father could have been among the dead.






The Fragments of a House

On top of a hill looking down a valley,
like a hand offering a bouquet of roses to a woman,
our house lay like a fragrance in the air.
It was not my father who built it,
this monsoon monster of a construction,
red mud as purity, brick as honesty,
with a roof screaming for heroism,
having outlived all the mahogany and oak trees,
the strongest of the Iroko trees,
the most beautiful flowers, the bevvy of roses,
the wonder hibiscus searching for cankerworms 
to steal, kill, destroy and devour,
to save a legacy no river and mountain would attain.
Whatever lies in the air for this holistic house,
that even the wildest storm with tempest
and plummeting temperatures or tempers,
ended up hitting a dead body,
still bite the heart of many visitors to our town.
Perhaps, it’s not a house, not a work of cement or sand,
nor the mixture of gravel and water,
that went beyond the corrugation of time,
but a monument like a pyramid, a dome,
what could serve as a bunker
to salvage and save those with gilded lives.
When the bombs fell on the monument,
they ricocheted off its walls,
bounced back into the air with cosmic power,
flew over the lightning moon,
as the sun hid under the clouds,
returning to the guns from where they plopped out.
At another time, the house had its own soul,
capturing the bombs like mosquitoes,
but the neighbouring houses crashed,
so loud was its survival and victory,
that the villagers staged a dance for its celebration.
It was my great-grandfather who built it,
with the invisible iron and steel he gathered
the day his god visited him, one dew-blanketed morning 
for saving his shrine from a cowardly massacre.
Though everyone in my village acknowledged,
that it was the spirit of my great-grandfather,
that fortified its walls and masterminded its defences,
since his body is within these oiled foundations,
would not yield to a second destruction.


Imagining the End of the Girl Vaping at a Train Station

If you need her to be beautiful, she is beautiful;
if you want her to be surreal, she is all yours.
but it’s enough that I notice her crouching at the station,
puffing away at the vapes in her open mouth,
shaped like a funnel, moist like a creamy plum,
surrounded by smoke, submerged in ecstasy.
She came from her house, north of the Thames,
Abbey Wood, Thamesmead, or Erith, Orpington,
somewhere her pleasure was no offence,
nor her birth in the years of barrenness a mistake,
but a celebration of her independence, freedom,
of that which made her human, which made her woman.
How she dragged on the pipe like spreading chill, 
like she held to something she must leave to die,
which decency chastised to stay hidden and unknown.
She was on her way to work in the city as a receptionist,
her hair bound together in a sheath like a cob,
her fingernails tending to the vapes like an urn,
as though a cigarette worked in secrecy’s vineyard
the sowing of reaping in the light of living,
her eyes filled with tears without immediate death.
She opened her mouth like the opening of rain,
through which the clouds hide from the storm.
I can see smoke seep its way into her lungs,
like worms marching towards the battlefield,
to conquer whatever they must conquer to live,
whatever they must consume in flesh and spirit,
shift everything aside to sow seed  inside her belly,
down to her feet, then to her belly and heart,
until they eat up her grey veins and pink arteries,
the blood stops flowing, her heart stops beating.
Is it not the smoke that halts the traffic of blood,
like a gun-totting soldier halting the supply of oil?