THE SAHARA TESTAMENTS

TADE IPADEOLA
WINNER OF THE DELPHIC LAUREL IN POETRY
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THE SAHARA TESTAMENTS

2
by the same author

Voices (with Temilola Abioye)

A Time of Signs
The Rain Fardel

3
TADE IPADEOLA

THE SAHARA TESTAMENTS

KHALAM EDITIONS

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First published in Nigeria in 2012
by Khalam Editions
7, New Adeoyo Road
Off Ring Road
Ibadan

Copyright © 2012 by Tade Ipadeola

All rights reserved

The right of Tade Ipadeola to be identified as author

of this work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright Act 2004

ISBN 978-978-912-555-3

Cover Art appears courtesy Irene Lopez Decastro

www.irenelopezdecastro.com

Ink sketch of the author appears courtesy Katrine Storebo

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 For
Al Khadra, poet of the Sahara
And for
Oyepeju Apinke and Rachel Adunola
Phenomenal women, aesthetes of speech.

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 I
FIRST BREATH

―A land is all its stories, and there are

many stories but one miracle of pollen.‖
— Afam Akeh

―For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field.‖

— Job 5:23

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 ‗I set out to find a clearing
ascending an endless red tract of sand
and erasing History with my heel…‘
— Odysseus Elytis

CHAPTER I

And in the beginning, it was verdant furrows

Aegyptosaurus, clams, strays from the sands.
The Raman spectra cast vertebrate shadows
Through Fata Morgana on these immense lands.

Atlantic winds carried echoes from the Amazon

Rainforest, tectonic twin, twice removed by sea
Habitat of Thermidor, feast-prawn of Avalon.
Flora breathed the nascent Levant air, free

From Mediterranean speech, received rain

Cooling the dark earth and the rocks annealed
Into this stabilitas, this strength sure as the grain
Of the cosmos, the vast universe congealed.

Transportation of fragments, task of first muse

Began here and Saint Augustine, millennia hence
Would trace the truth of God‘s abstruse
City through time into a mighty permanence.

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II

The fishwife in her wooden market stall

Tucks in a franc into her black brassiere,
Smiles as she hands over the fish. She is tall
Her teeth glisten whiter than the sassier

Neighbour‘s, whiter than any woman‘s, so white

I wondered if God knew she‘d make it
Into a magnet for custom and light.
I did not ask her name, I wouldn‘t pit

My halting French against her effortless river

Of Bambara and market French. I forget
What the fish tasted like but not the fever
Of curiosity, flaring as it did from a nugget

Of ivory that blinded my wandering eyes.

That woman was Senegal. Senghor‘s woman
Immortal in her blackness, market wise
Bringing back tides of the musings of a man

On a land made for poetry, the perfect

Turn of every phrase. In all of these
The desert was ever present, its idiolect
Suffusing the streets with a certain ease

Found in the Sahel, elegant, understated

Borderland dexterity, animist bon vivant
Measured out in bright speech that elated
With the germinal wisdom of the sun.

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III

The decorous chameleon of my continent

Rouses to incantations from gas flares
And a millennium of sand turns pertinent
In a sea-bound spill of harried hectares.

There is no stealth to the spreading wound

Let loose upon yesterday‘s savannah
No genteel grace to the usurped ground
Famished for clues to a lost nirvana.

Our chameleon loses limbs, loses pigments

Save for one dull range and we, transfixed,
Watch spellbound the rampant instalments
Of a dragon‘s diet. Flowers and blood are mixed

But these are not enough to halt the hunger

Rising from the belly of the earth
And nothing will suffice to appease the anger
Of this land except raw green mirth.

IV

An ibex dreams of grass and vagabond chlorophyll

Redacting the legend of leaves in deep green shrubs,
It ruminates ibex-heaven as a cockerel in Brazzaville
Blows its shrill trumpet. It wakes with dawn, rubs

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Rested eyebrows against a mate‘s white belly, rises,
Capra nubiana, effortless as sunrise, pure beast.
And it seemed a sin to the hunter to add to his prizes
This beauty of the Sudan. Lowering his gun, he went east.

There he met Emma McCune, daughter of fate

Heroine of a thousand tales. He fell in mortal love.
With her alabaster urn, devotion did not abate
When time froze the wings of his priceless dove.

He sat and wept by the river Nile. She didn‘t hear

His crying, did not need to. He made circles
Around his loss but none could help him bear
This magnitude of grief, he made Canticles

Still his tears outran the Nile. He made a monument

To a name that freed a generation, a shy name
That his tongue pronounced in a bold moment
That made an angel his lifelong ochre flame.

There is that remote Sudan, land of the Nile

And sun, motley as Meroe, vivid with dreams
Where the children flourished without guile
Where forest and shrub drank the same streams.

And there is this Sudan, codex rescriptus, palimpsest

Where janjaweed repaints memory in blood clots
Of innocents, where crude-fed militias kill in jest
Where oil and race yield endless, deadly plots.

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Slaughter, food skirmishes, rape and dire need
Exhaust Sudan every hour of the sundial
And dying is art where those that bleed
Fasten themselves to earth in their last trial

Of blackness, tendrilled as truth. We die,

Are written in the books of life and death
And also in another, where murderers lie
About their wealth with their last breath.

Every robe of this desert is native

And every robe is new. The ancient skin
Of the vast wastes takes captive
Every colour under the sun and nothing

Of the night is alien. The jewellery

For the desert‘s dance is a trove
Of stars, silent banners, deep-dyed cavalry
Of black storms, whispering love

Kindling stifled fires with dry provision,

Radical notions, sentient ambitions from the late
Pleistocene, fearless in the face of extinction,
Surviving to tell the truths that conquer fate.

This austere birthplace of the boomerang rings

Louder than any bell, it is eminent as death,
Killing clean both commoners and kings.
Quarry and hawk dance, now, with one breath,

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Inexorably mapping the spaces of survival.
Their dance is keen, is a form of ancient
Poetry, their unrehearsed and adept revival
Of animal chess. It is orient, it is occident,

It is a waltz of hemispheres, a duel

To the death before mankind invented
The condition. Theirs is nothing cruel:
Pure nature, need, not the merely wanted.

Their arboreal evasions, the spare economy

This is the music in their aerial moves,
Their angles, their terse, implicit taxonomy
Their inductive pi. Somewhere close, doves,

Feeding in the delta among papyrus and flax

Evading crocodiles, enact a different code:
Also musical, tamer – animal friendship, pax,
Soft as the small of every ear, tender as ode.

Thus reflecting, was the riddle of Meroe solved,

Thus were the writings deciphered, Nubia’s migrants
Walled up in southern cities where saints absolved
Even the bloodthirsty so that death warrants

Waited for wind shifts. Time cures some defects

Worsens others, sheds light on runes, draws the veil
Into the soul, through skullcaps and black berets
That some truth may shine into the darkened pale.

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VI

A fleeting, irascible memory of a dry day

With the gang, craving straw hats like water
On the climb up the Sun Stone in May
Feeling the hubris falling off a quarter

Of the way to the place of carvings.

Oued Tihalioune made my hamlet‘s Oke Jewoese
Seem like a joke. All superficial cravings
Shed for elemental liquid. The finesse

In the pose of that static rhinoceros

Weighed against the use value of stone
Made the artist and his work more precious
That eternal summer in purgatory‘s zone

Facing nature and the sweat of ancestors

Who also climbed, and laboured, and left.
The desert relived a verdant age of creators
Exhaling breath fragrant with their sweat.

VII
Here the elements in deep play spun the first gyre.
Upon a wing of the Sirocco perched, Kairos,
Diffident artist draped in indigo, astute with the lyre:
Upon the other wing, callow Chronos.

Gliding they did a duet, red and brown, of dust

And epigenesis; grace and guile. Still elastic
Their flight-path of song spread the ruse of rust
Now to Luxor, through Bubastis into the Baltic.

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Africa touched the world before the world
Touched Africa. It was ever thus, the lush
Semantics of sub-tropic birds coming unfurled
From within the cravat of a great heart-rush

Filling a lake to slake a thousand leagues of thirst

Growing polyglot plantations and a promenade
For every degree of the compass. It was a first.
Alas, nothing now survives the loose cannonade.

VIII

It was the age of flame trees, their implacable beauty

Claiming more surface than the sand. Lavish sunlight
Daubed each petal with pigment from stars. A fruity
Blanket perfumed Sudan, made a galaxy of delight.

It was the age of the rose, called by many names

In minds as simple as the reptilian, whose sole sport
Was blood drawn in death duels, whose games
Further dyed the landscape the hue of rich port.

Roaming magnate crocodiles, massive as mastodon

Mulled away their spendthrift afternoons, their talent
For flesh sated with fish, zebras, duiker by the ton
Shared alike with Afrovenators. The feeble lament

Raised by doves disappearing in the rosy haze

Of catholic aromatherapy, a sunlit hemisphere
Rent by fiery growth so rank it seemed ablaze
Intent on the continent. As if remorseful Mr. Blair

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Should turn his gift of speech on every African
Persuading all to plant flamboyant trees, carnation,
Amaranths. As if in Egypt‘s wake, the Nile‘s watering can
Should turn on every blossom, the soil of every nation…

That can’t be right. Really as if a contrite Mr. Blair

Should turn martyr, shed his warm blood
In a benevolent red fountain, with all his old flair
In an arc over the Sahara till his vision blurred,

And Bono, deigning, should be sole witness

Through tinted glasses to the mobile miracle –
With chary horses galloping wild, shunning harness
To a past that mastered blood and spectacle.

IX

Here, stone country tales have a hardness to them

Missing in stories of sand country, the harshness
Is of a different kind. A warrior Buddha‘s hem
Is caught in their pleats, a top-crust narrowness

Keen as stone-cry. These stones breathe brittle

Air, mark brutal graves, mourn nothing new.
Their bone-deep instinct of sentries alter little
Over passing ages in the wild. They are true

To that obsidian creed inherited from earth

When it was young and harder to please –
Grand stones of granite, of gneiss; the hearth.
Under their patrician gaze, reposed in stone-peace

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Monsoon after brusque monsoon, ascetic basalt
Inheriting wind, still receding rain, desert scribes
Inscribing the first hieroglyphs, shunning rock salt
Their heirs bequeathing Rosetta stone to the tribes.

Blue, blue skies. Clear cloudless morning

Made for fingering by the winter sun.
Such level light. Like smooth fabric adorning
The infant skin of day. Then a gun

Always a gun, praetorian or rogue to ruin

These mornings that could have been
Any from the past millennium. Tuning
The radio solves nothing, a change of scene

The same. It is the land as much as it is

The oil. The desert‘s haunting beauty
Its pure challenge. Its prospects of bliss.
Add to these the monk‘s protected piety

Which from history appears to grow

Out of the soil and air. The linked stars
From where we first learnt how
To reckon days, navigate, cure scars.

What grew the desert was the wind

Hot and dry and mangosteen – blowing
With hidden answers, rich with find
The unacknowledged labourer plowing.

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XI

Listen, the desert is singing. Singing, just singing.

Listen, it‘s a duet, a duet with the breeze
They are singing an old song full of clinging
Just clinging and its joys as they squeeze

In the manner of the elements. Their dance

Is a raft reaching back to genesis
Where with jasmine mingling they entrance
The clouds and every creature, sweet is

Their tan rhapsody, their melodies of old gold

Cartwheeling in the sunset, magnificent their display
Crowding space with all the awe it can hold
Riddling the radius of sunset at end of day.

They hum till darkness dons the desert with a cap

Called silence. And silence becomes a pouch
Holding the dignitaries: Mizar and Alioth in the gap
Cabri, Kochab, Alkaid. They sparkle as they touch

In silence, starry-eyed, up above the world so high

Their distant celestial dance as nuanced, as rich
As Liberian diamonds flung in the sky
With Angolan élan. They defy gravity, we itch

To touch them as they brace and bungee-jump

Into Amsterdam, or lunge and parachute into New York
Sky-diving as they please into London, bump
Into relatives in Lisbon and in world capitals where pork

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Is taboo. They stay detached like Nigerian inflation
Of which Fela sang with his tenor saxophone
And we launch space-probes into our constellation
For understanding why our craton is so prone…

Too wide for stirrups, the freeborn Sphinx remains

Untamed vendor of Fanon dreams Césaire acres
Diop‘s elegant logic of roots, architects and domains
Till truth itself is unguent and balm to wounded makers.

XII
For Akeem Agbaje

Age-marbled scrolls at Timbuktu rest on racks

Reincarnated in apographs, they will not bowdlerize
Their exemplars of sculpted stone, their tracks
Testify to salience that will not temporize

Mind equal to Euclid‘s, punctilious as periplus

Which Scylax made of old wayfaring Nile.
Timbuktu was bulwark, stark as Noah‘s ark, no gloss
On intent, her end surmised in stoic style.

Burst the bubble of our time machine and enter

Mali today. There is more cream than coffee
In the colour of the sand, more vendetta
In the grouse of the grumbling guide. See,

A mile is still as long in Mali, a fourscore as eighty,

The berry as black as currant in currant country
But sweeter. O Keats, the girls are as naughty
And they wonder at French boys standing sentry

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In their tight fatigues, peace-keeping nomads
Contrite in their contradictions. Their boots
When they march in drills delight village lads
Though vicious rumours spread about their roots.

In Bamako, the dream of the last Kiffian lives

Buoyed on bouffant clouds reaching adroitly
Through the shimmering of Sahel sieves
Into Sijilmasa, where none venture confidently.

Look who the winds brought back: Mansa Musa

And his caravans of gold, sheer volatility
Journeying with him on pilgrimage, farther
Into the pleats of carved dunes for posterity

The one man-hurricane that shook a peninsula

To its liquid foundations with solid wealth
Never seen before save in poetry from Africa
Showering principalities in the commonwealth.

To scouts it seemed an exodus of ninjas.

The awe in dust so apparent that none
Would dream of robbery or anything so rash.
Sun Tzu would have applauded or done

Something significant as gesture. The practice

Of a principle as perfect as this was rare.
Musa‘s company surged like gentle armistice
In the service of peace, paying every fare.

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XIII

Tonight, the sky is several districts full

Of coruscating stars, the heavens are entire
Cities of light, adrift with gravity‘s pull
Their names hanging on dark celestial wire

Fixed as fortune found in certain names,

Turned rubrical in the struggles of a race
Cesaire, Marechera, Okigbo – stalwart frames
Whose alchemy revives with onomastic grace.

The wind descends celestial stairs, dictates

Vectors and likely durations, rouses trees
And shrubs to test its limbs, finally fixates
On a hollow in the hill. By slow degrees

Dissipating with passing time, but weathering

Away the worth of every hour, invisible to the eye
But felt on hard rock-skin, as blown scouring
And on rock-viscera, as bastard Valkyrie.

XIV

Gordon and the Mahdi. Their tale still trembles

On the lips of whispering winds, two
War-clad termites, death-duellers. Fate dissembles
Their chivalries as a painter‘s hand, framing the coup

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de grâce in splendid colours. They expired
As they thrived, claiming Khartoum, striving
For mastery against entropy, their words fired
Mixed multitudes, the plain, the turban-wearing.

And their words hover in English war tales

Anecdotes told between burqas, mouth to mouth
Like cloistered communion. Another siege pales
In comparison with Khartoum‘s – north to south

Immanent in Sudan‘s memory, stamped in stone

These men, their words and deeds. Old men
Still warn the young against disaster. ‗Do hone
Resolve like either of these, masters of Zen.’

Inside Sudan is their garden of native tamarinds

Citrus, pumpkins and melons. It is kept
By wizened hermits unafraid of blighting winds
That replace their kind with a sober sept

Of wizened hermits from around the world.

They say that the garden belongs to God
And inside the hut is an ancient scroll curled
With a record of every seed and pod.

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 In the desert there is no sign that says: Thou shalt not eat stones.
– Sufi saying

CHAPTER II

I
It took a desert‘s heat to revisit the sorrow
Of mothers. Those for whom the world entire
Was Ramah. Women for whom no tomorrow
Offered lasting solace. Whose tears tire

Not. It did not matter, saint or courtesan

If son or daughter could not be found
In the wake of a slaving raid, as one woman
They mourned freeborn children now bound

And their anguish rolled loose like the lexeme

Of the desert, whose monotonous eye rhymes
Deep and wide, were temptations to blaspheme:
Offspring crossing boundaries to other times.

Elemental in their sackcloth, the women wept

Their way to private purgatories, where pain
Was alpha, omega and where torture, adept
As priests at inquisition, defamed old Spain.

The names of children, sons and lovers

Accumulated in the store of memory and spilled
Beyond bounds, the names of brothers,
The names of those who fought, those killed

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Resisting the tide. These names rose a monument
Through time, through stormy weather and fair,
Onomastic totems, towering where they went
Invincible. Names invisible and essential as air.

II

Skeletal soil, turgid hematite— this land of iron

Sires the toughest men, or else the hardiest
Women, patient-eyed, ruled by one criterion:
To live. They all are aloes, the truest

Found anywhere on earth, a people like baobabs

Like cactus, gypsum-grown in their stalwart roots.
Their stoic laughter, one with the breeze, dabs
Sweat off the day. Common error calls them coots

Until their hubbub ends the night. They are men,

Makers, fishermen of sea and the Senegal river.
They are the people, the sandstone women
Singing shuttle songs with Time the weaver –

They are strands of rare value in the fabric

Africa claims. I sing of them, people of dance,
Whose music retains the stuff and rubric
Of north-winds and easterlies, of deep romance.

By some strange code, the camera is suspect.

The tourist held in doubt. If he is of colour,
Deemed dangerous, watched in every aspect.
Even now, rewriting history and ancient lore.

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Sometimes, on the radio, speaking known tongues
Voices float in, proclaiming freedom from forced fealty
And in those moments, unbidden, come bright songs
Like muscled blackbirds, shattering the cruelty

Of pigment predestined bondage. They were thrice freed

And in a trice yoked again, their hope accumulates
Accustomed to that deferred summer of their breed
Waiting here and in the foggara, planting dates

In daylight, growing dreams at night, seeking

Wider architectures amidst the ruins of Arab industry.
They farm freedom in acres of their weakening
Chains, find faith to rise with the dawning century

So that Mauritania, aboriginal, a million times robbed

Can sprout with eucalyptus. The law was made
A double ass here, while backs still throbbed
A mock parliament decreed, and slavers were paid –

Compensated for villainy. Three centuries of wrong

Found no redress – no flowers of the mint
No token forty acres. But the Negro, he is strong;
And she bears her children with faces set as flint.

In Nouakchott, the Haratin bear a scar as old

As the Marib dam in Yemen. Time transmutes
Adam‘s abdication of green to greed for gold –
Equally hurtful — equally rank with seed for disputes

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So that memory suffers seizures with the script
Written in blood of infants, where a river
Carries on the crimson communion of child and conscript
Down, deep down, into Senegal‘s waiting fever

A fever nothing bitter breaks, boiling with blood

And pogrom-history, a fever nursed by greed,
By ethnic land-grab, spilling black exiles abroad
South into savannah and bone-deep vengeful creed.

Nouakchott teeters on the edge of waiting retribution,

Seismic, somnolent, but there. Surrounded by the poetry
Of justice, songs of change into that transition
Beyond bland letters of law and the paltry

Remedies of pale jurisprudence. Mauritania waits

For oracles of natural justice and liberation
From shackles forged in fear, at hunger‘s gates,
For surcease from blood as legal libation.

III

A discrete infinity of sand and dentured rock

Older than any anachronisms of snow
Rues the vows of an insomniac tropic clock
Intrepid labourer with furtive wind in tow.

They usher apparitions of bracing mythologies

Into space steeped in charm and chance
Coaxing themes of time and eschatologies –
Asteroidal and atomic, into broad remembrance

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Of things past, before marble escarpments
Standing through ages of rain and wind
Weathering the Khamaseen for engagements
With things the mind cannot rescind.

The sun‘s dying declaration of mazal tov

Inventoried at cool of day through synapses
Calm as sleep, roused rapid eye movement of love
To a dream of first takeoff, the pilot‘s praxis.

This is the birth-story of things Aeolian. Here

In the Sahara, from West-bound Atlas to East,
Where the Red Sea bounds a sinewed sphere:
Currents wherewith the land was fleeced.

There is no jest in the manner of the midday sun,

There never was. Aloof, a celestial carpenter
Hammering down a glory that can stun
All things from here to the earth‘s center.

IV

Follow footprints of a child learning to read

The sky, yes follow: turn literate in the script
Flowering amongst the clouds. Follow the lead
Of young weathergirls of the Sahara, decrypt

The cloud, colour by cadenced colour, the mood

Of tomorrow and the seasons in nature‘s hand.
It‘s worth a prince‘s ransom, the lasting good
You will learn from nature about this land.

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A day‘s testimony spins the fetal tornado
Whisking past a child into climbing clue –
Of the wind‘s mojo – there is much ado
About the hunkering down, and how true

It is that the weather wears masks, too.

Follow the child reading the sand‘s texture
In the wake of a funnel touching the blue
Sky, the sun‘s corona. Yes, follow their adventure.

Nouakchott ran cerebral fever, saw things

Sprinkling the horizon of the midday oven
Tribal amulets, shields against Azrael‘s wings
In a city mugged with heat. The city is even

Between those who favour relief in confection

And those preferring cool water, seeking shelter
From one element in another. A mother‘s affection
Keeps a teat in her child‘s mouth in the welter

Of taut drummings of the sun, roof stretching

To their limits in the purgatory. This city
Houses more humans than any in the coaxing
Maghreb, it teems with dazed life and pity

The breath of the unborn like lost butterflies

Moving through dawn in this new city as
Axioms of shifting sand. The set homilies
Of marabouts counter-pointing the impasse.

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VI

A boy writes his memoirs of a fecund stay

At the feet of tutors fastidious as the halls
Of the finest lyceum, then makes his way
At dusk to a hallowed spot, digs a pit, plants bottled balls –

They‘ll sprout into celibate dugout boats, moored

To stakes along the shrinking lake of pastel
Worn on shoulders of a village hut, dung floored,
Noble in the orange light of sunset– into a small hotel

Telegraphing nothing of history in hirsute Chad

A discreet chalet of neutered dreams, Arab fear
Mute in the milk bowl of castration made fad
By merchants of flesh, for whom a dear

Concubine must remain chaste, free of black

Touch. And spunk. In the poisoned caesura
Of their long desert march, fear of the dark
Haunts the master as fear of a desert cobra

Potent as death, whose plain allure, tinta negra,

Lassoes wild dreams in liquid loops telepathic
As Malinke pain recited on the strings of a kora.
Boyhood decreed beyond nature‘s span, emphatic

Soprano choirs, their lemon madrigals falling

In pale cadences across the Sahara forever.
They‘ll never die, their voices eternally calling
To trackless sorrow in the sands, they never

29
Grow old; they keep, like Adam‘s ancient apple
Full of sex still, and full of it. The texture
Of temptation, sun ripened and supple
Tantalizing in its promise of rapture.

Something of night rouses slaver to slave harem

A pig out to poke his truffle emporium
Eyes white as a young camel’s, high-pitched scream
From pre-pubescence, his flaccid imperium

Defeated by real digs. Sold rhinoceros horn

Still his tool would not span a slave
He strives to feed his troubled thorn
As his frame disappears in the cave.

VII

A night-long dialogue in the morganatic marriage

Of Moon and Mediterranean drifts in.
It helps that the couple has come of age,
Settled into an arrangement both can win.

The world was steeped in helixes. Were we to speak

We should speak of nothing but their plural spirals
Their remote colours, their games of hide and seek
From which much DNA comes, organic chemicals.

Our songs, should we sing, would be symphonies

Of small departures from the song of Adam and Eve
Removed in time. They would be the Nile's polyphonies
From loud Rwanda to hushed Sudan. We'll weave

30
Chant-volutes into the morning of creation day
Then unravel the mystery of pyramids in song...
But the world is steeped in dance as in decay.
Were we to explain, our tongues should stammer along

Caught in two minds – to descend or to ascend

To be gods or to be beasts. We were born
Into ethical countries though some condescend
Upon such fragile notions, lifting pride's horn

As in the Third Reich, to rouse heredity‘s honour

From a shallow crypt, maul birthright, cast a spell
Upon a seeing nation. The Fuhrer was spawner
Of blight in the marriage of heaven and hell.

VIII

Fortitude was fibre against the burning wind,

Breath of high noon exhaled with all languor
Without desinence, with that lone axe to grind
Against trace moisture, the nursed anger.

Judas was here, too, in an instant of time

Surveying all the vastness of this space
And was tempted more toward his crime.
O the endless wealth that is this place!

Erected in other kingdoms – other gospels

Hogging gold in the sight of myasthenic orphans
Wealth was local then, the gift of fallen angels
It would be two thousand years of man‘s

31
Exercise of usury before the sea-change
Into a global doctrine of Central Banks, debts
Structural Adjustments, stock-markets, Africa‘s mange
So ugly children screamed in the hour of their deaths:

‘Shut yo moufs, our Daddy kyant be ugly so!’

Here in Aba, loud in Lagos, breaking textile mills
Into diabolic dance, smashed moieties, calypso
Rings beyond its silvery kettle-drum as it kills

And kills and keeps killing the hapless

Continent, the cradle, the all-mother land
Which The Economist hexes as ‗HOPELESS‘
Which matriarch Aidoo defends with a dextrous hand.

IX

Three oligarchs of the desert, wrapped in gauze

Stood mute in the twilight reeking of placenta;
Cain‘s brood, they speak the language of force
Effortlessly through their sword‘s scarlet mantra

Watchwords they dispense, between hoof-rise

And hoof-fall, tell of the manner of red dawns
Speckled with doves, mottled as the eyes
Of ruined empires. Outside, on the lawns,

The triumvirate splits Egypt into polished sarcophagi

Wearing their wreaths around their long necks
Rumours in the tarrying night, the bloody magi
Herod‘s last hope in the quest for salvage from wrecks

32
It would be centuries before the animosity of gunpowder
Tempered their bloodletting enterprise, before amnesia
Drew its curtain of mist across the sands, a hoarder
Of misery, the worst things. Also of ambrosia.

Smack in the season of hurt‘s perfection

Where citizens drink gunpowder tea for fuel,
Every day search for the heart of contradiction
Plaguing the realm‘s slow-shifting dunes of cruel

Magnitudes crawling towards their House of Words

Their Palace of Peace – restless youth shift gear
Out of bounds of rusty compasses, displace chords
Towards harmony and strike it without fear

Of sacred swine, plump pigs of priests

Afraid of the march out of Smara. Young blood
Reaching for watersheds shun tainted trysts
Choking rare aquifers. They prophesy a flood

Of gushers pure as rain irrigating this desert

These ancient wastes wilful as wind. They lead
A dance of rainforests toward the concert
Of sturdy shrubs, berry trees, branches bearing seed.

In Sokoto there was a school, now spectral

Where mallams proved theorems of the triangle
Made dissertations on the merits of a federal
Government, reciting poets as they wrangled…

33
X

In Sokoto‘s kitchens, ecstasy staggers the pulse

With rare legumes, ricemeal, cabbages and roasts.
Outside, suya, peppered over with panache in the false
Light of paraffin lanterns where every evening boasts

Fresh kills and the kindness of instant noodles

Served garnished with lettuce and a choice of eggs.
A youth, almajiri, receives a serving of tea and huddles
With the waiting troop, all standing on spindly legs

And their chatter continues into early morning

Going over happenings and also boko haram.
There is no consensus, a few cigarettes burning,
And each hoping to be the famous last Imam.

One does, out of that horde, become

The priapic king of that harmattan evening.
He won‘t tell the story; he has made it home,
His store of memories, his final swan-offering.

A desert‘s diaspora whispers in scattered gardens

Where plants like kept women swoon with watering
And the aseptic present bearing dark burdens
Conspires to kill the renegade seed. There is muttering

In the wake of vanished arbors, the plains

Playing dead like Sahara‘s volcanoes. Windborne
Charms are balms to the earth‘s perpetual pains,
Her stripping and rape, her hope forlorn.

34
XI

The desert retraces our origins, it weighs

Our universe in silk, follows the brown bend
In the trail of its own heart. Our ways
Are too dark or too snowy white, we offend

Against the primary colour of earth: loam

Pepper green, azure. We have invented Negro
Aryan, Red and Yellow men, they roam
Metastasized, invading schizoid pages, they grow

Ardently, relentlessly, into twin-tower bombers

The lone gunman of Oslo‘s daytime terror
Rendering the earth crimson with the reaper‘s
Scythe. Hate‘s shifting colour feeds the error

Of final solutions. A Reich‘s remedy smolders

Together with history but only earth can answer
Old questions – obtuse dinosaurs, bones in boulders
Remind us that nothing, not Field Marshal nor panzer

Defeats the earth. We lean into the future

Growing pains with us, seeking clear light
To read what history has written in the features
Of earth‘s profile – our instruments, our plights

They suffice for a glimpse of all creation

They hint, never harangue, their inflection
Nebulous at harvest, spur curiosity, appreciation
For what is hidden of the moon‘s plain reflection.

35
XII

Told a hideous strength would attend his eldest

Son, a General rejoiced at the birth of Hannibal.
Soon, son would follow father to sworn war-fest,
Prophecy prove true, cruelty resound as capital.

Lost to the lure of war he forsook Imilce, a flower

He won by wit and poetry, donning dread
Wherever he turned on the Iberian, his power
Felt as much as seen in its steady spread.

In Imilce, Carthage found a queen, her dowry

Worth a kingdom full of kings. Testosterone
Won out, choosing elephant above dromedary
Barca‘s scion upped and sailed upon a prone

Ocean. Ponder his predilection for water, waves

Shunning dunes for the therapy of water, he,
Heir to military glory, foreign land and slaves,
Latched on path to war-hoard and the sea.

Her dowry of sovereigns, worth a queen‘s ransom

Draped around her tender neck like tiny mills,
Beyond the help of augury she knew the sum
Of peace is the perfumed body he steals

Inhuming her memories and childhood dreams.

Departing for Carthage, ambassadress and queen
Stages her fleeting scene on power‘s beams
And then retires into history, untouched and pristine.

36
A wrought cruse survived the ruins
Of Carthage until this century, something whispered
Its antiquity, breathed its age in runes
Into the morning, that day it was discovered.

XIII

No clouds conceal that majestic choir of dawn

In their chariots of the stars, their matinal charm
Precedes the first light. This is music, sans brawn
Set on scales celestial, fresh from song farm

Until morning touched a curse that spread

Down the rungs of angels transmogrified
To poison the well. Man shall not live by dread
Alone, an earnest of morning rhetoric deified

The first Pharaohs and their reign of labour,

Their cities of death. Dawn breaks into debate
Over the Nile‘s delta, as blessings eye the harbour
Of humankind‘s cradle, where djinns lure fate

Into death‘s valley. The skies renounce their veil

Of kohl and henna, day rises from its tent
On the mountains, shunning ease, setting sail
For the zenith of noon where rays sent

Strike keenest on earth‘s brows. Glory tracks

The ascent of day in the desert, butter melts
Ancestors warn the wanderer of ancient cracks
Of tribal whips giving rise to welts.

37
‘The undevout astronomer is mad.’ Said the echo
And I smiled. The undevout nomad is mad
Too. A far cry is he from the wall gecko
This wild chameleon called the nomad.

XIV

Peeling off its blanket of dust, Atlas receives

A first sunkiss for the day, a serif of affection
In the long romance of nature. The mind conceives
Everything grandly here, every waking notion

Comes dressed in infinite skins of blunt desire

Where hope rests on the resurrection of ruins
And the waiting songs of a patient Nuba choir
Of migrating songbirds. The distant caves are inns

From the shrinking temperance of morning, heat marks

Gathering on the brows of gravid rocks. Here, Tifinagh
Riddles make the morning bed, reconnoiter avatar tracks
Ahead of a scarlet homecoming. A Touareg laugh

Rises from the belly of a hardened shepherd

Breaking in quiet chuckles in the silent cinema
Of his every working day. The bucolic bard
Sings to clear his being with rhythmic enema

Red as the soil of Tamanrasset is the sun

Now setting above the rims of ancient volcanoes
Flaming red, the colour of a ripe pun
Birthing another wriggling its wry toes.

38
Those were the hours, atop Atlas, with Hasselblad
Salient as saints, recording gems of vision,
Marking milestones of time. Hunger clawed a glad
Face up to that observatory, gaining precision.

XV

Dew on white mushroom glistens in the early morning

Sun, making the light celestial and the saprophytes
Delectable. Already, lizards are out for sunning
And the hunt above in motion by the kites.

It is the twentieth year in Saoura and the waters

Are partial to plants as the wadi is partial
To saurians and birds. The flood mutters
Along a path predestined by its martial

Forbears since prehistory. It is Abiku, calling

Now as it does every twenty years. A generation
Passes through the Road of Palms, witnessing
Its flow before the next. The flood‘s oration

Loud in Guir, declines into a murmur before long

And the south receives its silt in utter silence.
Always has been thus, merchants of the song
Replay its fat lyric, its brief munificence

In marching and campfire tunes made for memory

And for prayer in the Abadla – for fertility
For melodic rain charm. Dam poets vie in theory
Over ways to make the dew stay, their fraternity

39
Ponders alternate visions of Tidikelt and Gourara
Where, as in Touat, yield is as in nightmares
And man must revive the dying Foggara
For dreams to flourish upon their red acres.

In the forenoon, the sun stands above the Jabbaren

A master of his school of Shotokan; urging his rays
To strike as if going through. A company of men
Trudge on with the burdens of their desert days

They are pitiless as they are pitiful, their will,

One with the earth now scorched to mineral
Purity. They are pebbles in the rogue bill
Of a duck-sky maddened for want of liberal

Rain. They are set to survive the anvil:

Aiki-jujutsu, adepts at turning the tantrum
Of the midday sun, its logorrhea and cavil
With the silence of syncope, the colostrum

Of promised rebirth in earnest. For a spell

Muteness reigns in the battalion of caravans
Intent on crossing the burning sands, the hell
Stretched out like an eternity of burning barns.

XVI

Solitude is the shadow descending at dusk

Claiming Qattara for its own, the heart
Of wandering comes to rest, the husk
Of heat settling this depression in part

40
With silent desert owls. Salt phantoms, gray,
Powder the face of the windswept valleys
With ghostly hands manacled with spray
From remote red and blue of surrounding seas.

XVII

Rai. Hircine monument, gift from father to son,

Moves tonight between two mountains in a duet
Riffling through the night upon festive Oran
To find an echo chamber in a passing poet.

It leaps, nimble as a kid, sure-footed on the crags

Of shepherd geography. It mirrors the ballet
Of wild things, the pouring motion of stags,
The flight of crested eagles off their runway.

Time nurses no saplings in the grave outback

And silence muzzles everything but the wonder
At lunar landscapes here on earth where lack
Rations moisture with a flattened spoon. We ponder

Nothingness to being. Time trusts nothing to volcanoes

Clustered in the heart of Nubian sand trails
Memory roams in the genome of Bantu toes
Crossing the seas with camels and contrails.

The ages merge with tongues, some for beauty

Some for Mammon‘s sake, their loud glossolalia
Tempered by the truths of disaster and duty.
Thus, master idioms rained upon black impluvia

41
The new, proud swords of speech, full of three-
Letter words that spell death, dearth and wrath—
Words that grow like grapes upon the primal tree
Of knowledge, settling man upon the path

Of licentiousness. Time transplants, moves life about

On its Kon-Tiki, digs deep graves for grave mistakes
And buries what the mind cannot but doubt.
Time, rich in speech and silence, rakes

Shadows from dreams like chaff from seed

To mulch the future to multitudes for harvest
In deserts now allergic to breath. Earth will feed
Her children from leanness to verdant rest,

And time shall nurse the broken bone back

To marrowing. In the found songs of Meroe,
Nubia turns bone-setter, humming a black
Tune of mending, proud, polished as a hoe.

XVIII

I have been through the desert, from Aleg

To Lemketi, town to garrison, Sahel to arid wastes
The brave in their exodus move tents, peg by peg
Into desperate seas. What comes across tastes

Of sea salt, tears, grievous memories, constant heat

So that Europe‘s embrace comforts, but feebly.
From Bassikounou to Lemreya, a desert‘s dry teat
Hangs limp as sea sirens sing alluringly

42
To Rasta man rhythms, calypso, as folk lose out
In countless hamlets to quela birds, mirthless
In their bevies of hunger. This drought
Totes scolopendria to Nouakchott, journeying shoeless

To Spanish Malaga. Home is that mirage

Faint with longing in the tentative song
Of earth‘s refugees, survivors, human arbitrage
In the trade between living and capital wrong.

XIX

For a warrior‘s burial some men risk all,

Life and limb. The most prized honour
From kin and country— they would fall
Riven, beg death from battle as favour

Such men have lived and died forgotten

And yet such men still live. They crave
The company of their kind, not boughten
By gold or silver. They are the brave

True believers, men of the endless lands

They seek the permanence of earth itself
In a haven of honour not made with hands
But inhabited whole, not gathered like pelf.

They are sons of milkmen, gardeners, potters.

They live as they die, resolved both ways
Within every breath, with sons and daughters
To carry their legends through their days

43
The road to Tripoli erupts with their buds
Genies of thwarted dreams snoozing in the sands
Waiting for the wind, iron studs
Of Bradley tanks on salt marshes, wastelands.

XX

There were routes to slavery‘s hell

Apart from ship holds. Watch a manacled throng
Trudge their way north, agony in every cell
From thirst and scorpions, deep wrong

Of the traffic going on for two thousand seasons.

There were stray visions of calcium remains
Of dinosaurs on those journeys. God‘s reasons
For the fossils eluding the captors‘ carbon brains.

But always the brutality of that perished age,

Gluttonous for flesh, resurrected with every sighting
And time itself could not be tomb enough for rage
Or curse of wronged victim alighting.

This none understood until John Garang, who, possessed

With Arabic pronounced the word for crucifixion
Of an entire race. He spoke for the oppressed
He wrote. He sang the nuanced contradiction

Of famished destinies in the teeth of plenty

Misery plural like verbs of a ravaged morality
Which, intransigent slavers contend, twenty
Wise men in council cannot prove with finality.

44
XXI

In corpulent Carthage, the Senate failed to heed

Hannibal‘s plea to arm merchants and citizens
That Carthage may stand and never fall to greed
Or raiding armies of foes or sterile denizens.

How that dull assembly mirrors my very own

Daily denying lessons plain to the sight
That every child must learn until they‘re grown
What builds a people, what maintains their right.

So a nation bickered from within her barbicans

Too timid to seize a willing future by the waist
Until the future faded in the dust of caravans
Which nomad raiders rode to lay the land waste.

Witness descent into night‘s somnolent contradiction

A pax as wrong as war and just as fraught
To which Carthage succumbed a fallen nation
Which was the glory of a people that fought

Who failed to arm the host and now has lost

Gentile and Jew to history‘s sword, these acres
More beautiful than dreams, worth more than it‘ll ever cost
Where rose our finest, our dreamers and makers.

That era of legend stands in the halls of time

With horsemen and kings and born nobility
Where the sun arose and shone its prime
Upon a land as rich with dreams as virility.

45
XXII

Following Alkaid, star of the belligerent, men toughened

By thirst wrest deathly rays from the destroyer of nations.
Their malevolence trumps Herod‘s, they enter Abyei‘s roughened
Manger in the night to rupture winter‘s myth with oblations

Of Sudan‘s dark children. To which god do they pray but crude?

To which hearth do they retreat but the hearth of hate?
Their soul is sold to greed, their minds to oil‘s prelude
Of death. But black remains, the blood tide that won‘t abate

Even as the desert reddens. The dark child survives

Their fatal joys to stoke her day of triumph in the wilds,
She is the child, like Christ, with geography that thrives
Beyond the nerve-gas now whose providence exceeds a child‘s.

She is ancestral owner of the Sahara, shepherdess of sheep

And goats, keeper of generations whose destiny abides
In the simple lore of seed and harvest, her legends keep
More than herds alive, she from whom nothing hides.

XXIII

Shifting with the sands, a caravan‘s trail follows

Obscure declensions across the dunes. The tribes
Flee fighting between strange armies and gallows
Toward farthest points on ancestral maps that scribes

46
Record as safe in times of distress. The times
Were dark, the carnage startling. Europe warred
Punctuating the desert with loud war crimes
Over which Nuremberg, numb with shock, sits scarred

In a past perpetually with us, reserved ‗sine die‘

Till final judgment day. Shed blood clamours
When charge sheets choose silence and juries lie
Returning verdicts of horror. There are rumours

Of violence beyond words, vile rape, villainy

From which clerks shrank to write, crime
Staged by minions of the Furher‘s tyranny
Recorded in genome of survivors for all time.

XXIV

Scorpions in their phratries, difficult neighbours

All sing the same anthem of the rolling sands,
Who dares them is a fool, whatever their colours
Having outlived a host by placing no demands

On others, only on themselves, leaving no heat

Signatures for nature‘s assassins to track
Abdicating water for mere moisture, their feat
Of endurance growing legendary, leaving no crack

In those armours, only resolve. The wizards

Amongst them are the stealthiest, gliding
Over land like grey smoke, surprising lizards
The way death surprises man. Sliding

47
Just so into passenger seats, the consternation
Registering long enough in lizard or man
For reclamation of dignity or its negation
As protein emissaries find their ways around the barn.

The desert dares kill a man among his kin

It dares to strip a maiden before her beloved
Nothing dissuades the dune and starved djinn
From swallowing whole the harmless dove.

XXV
For Ike
Sothis rising rewrites the calendar, tickling the Nile
Into spilling laughter over the brown delta:
And the desert daydreams of a wayward style,
In colours stolen from night and wind‘s welter—

This effulgence of binary light informed Okonta

Eons past, as enzyme of a sperm within a sperm
In a cosmic whisper, of truth beyond the abacus finger
That where a germ grows another grows also, germ

And germ alike, thing and thing alike. Sirius

With Sirius B, Sothis with the Nile and corn.
It was the kind of truth that travelled, curious
As a croupier in the rainforest, weary and worn.

We sold inventions, lived in Egypt on the shadoof

Who once were emissaries of distant galaxies
And far from the Nile now, with not a proof
Of our star-sojourn, only mastabas, anxieties

48
Of return through quincunx gates of dreams
Minted on the Nile, of the fellaheen in song
Whose clan-notes disdain pleasure-screams
Of dollar princesses and the tramp tong.

49
 ‗…traveller in the desert,
make an arrow with stones before you sleep‘
— Joseph Brodsky
CHAPTER III

Marrakesh is a hummingbird standing still in the sun

A thesis in motion, stilling tongues and dialects.
I have watched as her streets dissolved in fun
At night, a Möbius rendering of joy‘s analects

Leaving Casablanca and its dreams unfurling

With the calligraphy of seismographs, we try
For a trail left by old Almoravids, night calling
The party to a closet of camphor, bracing and dry

As the desert air. The company armed itself fragrantly

With axioms native to the soil, manifest envy
Green as Nigerian passports. For Fez, militantly
As hope, and to Jelloun‘s country, as memory‘s envoy

Into modern streets built from bones into plains,

Ancient spoliarium of manifest destinies.
There is poetry here, of neat sculpted quatrains
And jagged, as of the edges of the distant Pyrenees.

50
II

The swagger of young eagles soaring in the sun

Oblivious to the weight of light resting
On outstretched wings, their trajectory of fun
Wide as Sahara, swooping low and cresting

With adiabatic thermals. They are lords

Of flight, banking in time from vortices
And wind pockets, slicing clean as swords
Through morning air into surpliced cornices

Of air, cruising through columns into vacuumed corridors.

Soon they age compared to mountains, soar alone
For decades soaring, outliving the condors
Coming to rest in a ball of feathers on a stone.

I have envied them, their indifferent freedom

I have pitied their hyperactive femininity
Their perennial regicide, their shrinking kingdom
Embering out to ash with sex and DDT.

III

From Agadir, the magnific pose of the Atlases

Decants into the eyes, their mythic terrain
Pours through the mind‘s hour-glasses
Steady as regiment of rock in rain.

51
They neither flinch nor flush, their composure
Lasting as the very word. Present, continuous
Their range defines the land, defies erasure
Through time, memento mori to the cause

Of durable patience braided into desert geography

With granite resolve, of myth that breathes
Through translation into a wealth of literate industry
On every continent and sea. Stoic as wreaths,

Rockroses place tenacious hold upon the face

Of each sibling Atlas, upon dimple and fissure
In their sworn struggle to encircle in embrace
The Telamon brothers indifferent to plea or pressure

Yet friendlier to life and love than the dune‘s

Anhydrous viscosity. Their vegetal love, barely requited
Spans countless centuries like the monodic tunes
Of Maghreb pine and cork, shunned but united

In purpose to cloak the mountains in colour.

Tenacious ferns, their millinery of moss, grass
Arborvitae, they are contenders in their ardour
For chance to clothe the flysch with sartorial sass.

The traveller notes their Sisyphean labours,

Their ardent business of flanking horst
With heather, these monumental paramours
Armed as arbutus, raining down roots into crust.

52
IV

Atlas Telamon, enduring endless time in vital cold

The spheres on his shoulders, his eternal toil
Relieved by sun‘s warmth by day, the moon‘s old
Tug by night. His sweat rejuvenates the soil

Growing phlegmatic grass and trees that tease tomorrow

Season upon copper-deep season, the mountain annals
Of High Atlas taunts biographers of earth to borrow
Wind-borne Greek idioms into Arabic bacchanals

Of phonemes. Steeds of speech browsing leeward

At Talrhemt, there they ferry Berber syntax
Into Teda country where wind and word
Conjoin in rebirth of the legend of Ajax

Seven days I soared with a tramp eagle over these ranges

Riding thermals, hovering over bajadas and troughs
Bird-eyeing the landscape of dreams and changes,
Landing to rest awhile, tasting fructose, taking off.

Dawn discovered us over the heights of Ksour,

The ranges of Amour, Ouled-Naïl, Zab, Aurès,
Tébessa, majestic mount Chélia. My thermal tour
Traverses ash-Sha‘nabī, regales in stout stories

Of Ouenza. Here the winds, intransigent

Blow synchronously across the hoary heights
Of High Atlas, their soaring moans strident
Piercing sleep, ancient as the cry of kites.

53
V

Giants conversed, our star with others, in muted tones

And we slept as if in silence all through
Their parliamentary discourse of distant drones.
Every night they uttered something new, their plough

Ploughing the new universe with the force of law.

Only the desert listens, only the desert hears
The new twist in their arguments, the seeming flaw
In yet another world. Dwarves discount cosmic fears

Working iron the while, that core element ancestors

Worked with mind and muscles in distant smiths
Invigorating fibres of fortune, ancient praetors
Desperate for possession and glory in myths.

VI

For compasses they had the constant stars

Rich sand and coarse, the plangent smell of sea
Milestones of relics and remains of many wars
Also fringe forests whose mirages they could see.

Sent forth like seeds of cicadas, no highway

Received them, only desert, from war
That bellowed like Babel all night and day
In pogrom. Egypt bled from Thebes to Luxor

54
The dead lay in throngs, Arab and Black
From smoke and steel, club and poisoned pike.
Civilization changed pilots, survivors swore sack
As vultures settled to feast, their dislike

Or choice for Black or Arab flesh remained

Unclear. Carrion birds feasted as crows,
Colour blind, until their bellies strained
With fallen flesh, they rose in flight through vows

Of those whose cities were laid waste, whose trusting fortunes

Turned on treachery within a fog-bound night.
Scribes wept the loudest, their runes
Had failed. A horde had won the fight.

VII

‗The hawk shall not turn food for the crow‘

Said the eagle. There shall be other flesh
Other blood, said the raptor, his old brow
Grey with decades, gazed upon the city of Marrakesh

That grand bird leapt aloft on wings spread

Like Lilienthal‘s patent, cleaving the dusk air
Apart like a late discovery of a certain dread
Settling the siege-camp, intoning, war is never fair

And so it was, shades of slain Almoravids

Concurring with the bird, watched as if a game
Of Go were nearing very end. Quoting Ovid‘s
Metamorphosis to gatekeepers of the ancient name–

55
That of their warring enemy who fulfills
The prophecy. All night the final battle raged
Men dying in thousands like fish with oiled gills
Gasping for air amid the ruins that caged

Their once bright city of dance. Like men,

Cities resurrect through other men, this is eternal
Law nor birds nor poets can alter — only the pen
Roasts scorpions safely, only the pen infernal

As Imru-al-Quais‘ – wakeful with dreams

Of her garments. His opera
Plays out beside blue moonlit streams
Of his wanderings. Her dance is a cobra

Riding a green camel, her dance is flame

Lit in pitch darkness. At once mortal
And divine, her dance bears no name
It is aphrodisiac, zoned to the pink portal.

VIII

This spill of earth in sand dunes stupefies

Yielding to the feet as they approach
In dimples that disappear as winds rise
In servitude to heat. Travellers broach

The delicate topic of omens, knowing fully

How unhelpful they can be in straits
How rarely they become of use, how unruly
They become in the face of repression. Ripe dates

56
Sweet to the palate, punctuate the silences
It helps to think of nourishment— who knows
When it‘ll be needed? Twin binocular lenses
Make navigation easier till the dog-star glows

Underneath their breaths, each traveller prays

For water. May the store suffice the journey
For the desert looks endless. Seven days
Thus far, seven days more. No night is funny

Mapping the Sahara as it merges into Sahel

In avid dream-tangles, the tropic of Capricorn
Shape-shifts from carnivore bird to koel
Impudently escaping the clutch of a falcon.

IX

Love‘s algorithm is the hardest to muster, circling

Wagons of intellect and mind, a bloodied albatross
Winged by circumstance but stubborn still, unyielding
In that pursuit of chiaroscuro and of loss.

From Mzansi to Ras-ben-Sakka, romance stutters

In the strife of dialects, blossoms briefly
And is withered in the sun. A rhino, it falters
In the dance between tribes, flourishing feebly

Within hearts in the mean crosshairs of power.

The darker my skin the deadlier the dum-dum
Bullets. The fairer the rose the wee louder
The whispers. Othello‘s other casks of rum

57
Are broached tonight in Tunis like truth serum
Infused as lethal injection to yet another pair
Of lovers beyond borders whose chatter goes numb
In the racial searchlight hovering above their lair.

Fresh grass was food enough for donkey

Tied to mill, describing mindless circles
In a task that man invented. Food was key
In keeping revolt at bay, the mill‘s cycles

Running for two thousand years. Imagine

What joy it must have been to beasts
Freed at last to graze abroad by machine
That threshes corn from husks for feasts.

XI

A great one for anecdotes you are, voluptuous

Beauty, aesthete of veld and winelands.
Together caught in the paradox of unctuous
Riddles of the Sahara, I honour the hands

You spread to bridge these plural distances

Of mind and matter in the flowing sweep
Of vision shared across passports and boundaries
So that our Africa may no longer weep

58
The outcast, prodigal mother of every race.
I honour that indifference to skin, that blend
Of heart and mind that probes with grace
In a world too summary for a just end.

You are a great one for sifting through

Inclement weather, for finding that calm spot
Where conversations hold in the rough
And my Negro heart laughs loud at the plot

Kicked into the open for the sun to see

One bland strand after another. The seasons
Turn, fields turning after them and the sea
Over which we both walk— entangled reasons

Too miraculous for ordinary eyes, too strange

For common comprehension. You are a great one
For the hint of humour that wins at the exchange
Of trophies for battles in the final victory won.

XII

Fahrenheit tangos of wind and vermillion sunsets;

Druze memories of Luxor temples, these artefacts
Endure in their spaces awaiting passenger jets
Hauling tourist ears where a tour guide redacts

Tales of hoary Egypt, the Nile, Sharm-El-Sheik

Hirsute Thebes where gods go to test gyroscopes
Writing their findings down on jars canopic
Resting their limbs in resin and their hopes

59
On a script memorized for that final exam:
He has not slept with his neighbour‘s wife
(Or has he?) She has not indulged the ram
By incest alone has he ruined another life…

Akhenaton wept. Not from malaria, doubt

At what the landed gentry had all began to spurn:
His cosmic vision, monocled, from many a bout
Of brain-fever birdsong and plasmodium falciparum.

Waking to the silence for the first time,

Waking in the tent to the cold, the world
Adding sagacious dimensions to its rhyme
Of evergreens and snow. The earth unfurled

In a vast field of gold, cool to touch

Way too large to haul. Here before first breath
Certainly here at the last. You can vouch
For its in-situ fidelity in life as in death.

XIII

You, child, Euphorbia Antiquorum, walk in light

Walk tall, you have been true. Your ancient name
Rings in the morning sun like a bell of delight
And when evening comes, your enduring fame

Rests in the rays of the moon. Many have spoken

Out of turn in the gathering of menders, they said
What mortals say of mortals— they have broken
Silence over an immortal— they did so unafraid

60
Of censure, the supple tongue of mortals.
But grace girds you, child, in the strife
And honour paves your alabaster portals
Through the clamour of calumny‘s fife

Mistaking you for a mere human child. But you

Endured the march across vast stretches whole—
As a child, emerged from confines of masters who
Mind nothing more than logos when the goal

Always was liberation from darkness and the void

Your tread is light on the horizon, your voice
Clear as a spring — haunts the paranoid
Shadows of throwback sentiments to rejoice

In a dawn cresting on immobile dunes, fragrant

With spices from a brand new day. Even now
As the universe expands, you forbear the ignorant
And smile. Let them proceed as they know how.

XIV

Set off like a blond clock in the dark

The leader‘s nurse makes mistletoe tea
Before packing to leave aboard the ark
Floating on the beach of Libya‘s sea.

Dawn, and a phantom lighthouse of Libya sinks

Into the sea at Sirte, another boat‘s wake
Contrives a transient epigraph. A nightmare links
Asia to Europe through Africa. A century opaque

61
Disgorges flotsam and boatpeople in war-dread
Into reluctant arms of others unsure of peace
Though geography is magnet for daily bread
And xenophobes who deny the welcome kiss.

Sudoku moments in Algadez, between hideouts,

Choice declines a slippery slope into quietude
Wary as a snake resolving nagging doubts
About the flux of safety in the interlude

Of a voyeur world peering hard at an ending.

Nigerienne nights were made for such intrigue,
Zero sum theories of game and hunter bending
Every strained rule of endurance and of fatigue.

To the tyrant, the West became a perspicacious dragon

Full of harmful intent and unvarnished harm. He was half-right
The belly of that beast bays for blood in a flagon,
Straight and on the rocks, flesh tenderized by fright.

Chimera and prey dance in tightening circles—

Dust stirs in demon cones and then it feints
Right and left, left and right, working miracles
With space so wide and yet ever so small. Even saints

Cannot secure reprieve for a rat in a cat‘s paw

Only guns, for cat was phallic champion
With his armoury of steel. It became the common law
Thenceforth, for other rats: first to court the tampion

62
And then to pray, that future rats will have a head
For heights, a will to power, the naked muzzle.
They dreamt of being bats with wings spread
In readiness for flight and aerial hustle.

The oracle to the deaf is made tactile

Done in colours the eyes cannot deny.
The oracle to the deaf is a dish of bile
Or else a pitcher pouring with honey.

Thus the word that went before to Tripoli

Explicit as thunder, climactic as the rain
Thus the word that went forth: he must flee
Or die tarrying, perish in a tide of pain.

The oracle to the deaf is a hanging bat

Upside-down, observant of the way of birds.
The oracle to deafness is a prowling cat
Demonstrative to rats beyond provenance of words

Thus the arachnids issuing to the nomad tent

From Benghazi to far seeing Fezzan: apocalypse.
But though the tyrant could smell the ferment
The mead amid honeysuckle, he chose his demise.

Thus the vision to the southern realms, the Maghreb,

The Sahel, the frothing savannah. Thus the oracle
To the Nubian lands, the ambulatory parable
Of lingering tyrants, fated to the spider‘s web.

63
XV

Clinical light scrubs reinforced glass at the atrium

Where Goldschmidt and his brood meet death
In elegant equations. The amplified abecedarium,
Pregnant as protocol, tasks mortal breath.

Spirit and men sail through rafts of bevelled books

Expounding the calculus of atoms, elemental speed
Degrees at which rarefied neutron cooks,
The right mantra to make electrons bleed.

One day, midsummer, their guarded onomasticon

Registered a name so French, the atrium brightened
With romance. The fellow brought a lexicon
Radiant as radium, to the table, he enlightened

Rapturously, on a world as yet untouched

By the miracle of the atom bomb, a perfect
World in which to test the Pale Horse. He clutched
Proprietorially, a map of my Sahara like a prefect.

Gumma grows on the skin of my Sahara, festering

In radioactive flush, it grows on the groin
Of the desert where stale waters run, vesting
The future with death. The hand tossing a coin

In pitch and toss is leprous, deadly at its game

Of roulette, leading time’s currency in dance
From purgatory to hell. It is a crying shame
How many children swoon in trance.

64
XVI

Sudan rid the landscape of Afrovenators, haggled

A reign of rams onto vistas of clapping valleys
Where streamed primates rose bedraggled
Into the sun, into civilization, into galleys.

Nubian forests listened to distant snow, empathized

With conifers across the plangent expanse, heard
The Alps declaiming cold until rocks verbalized
An astute loneliness alien to bird and bard.

There is an apocryphal tale, told time

And time over, each telling a fresh whisper
Of its Chinese origins, yet retaining prime
Aroma of ground anecdotes brewed at proper

Hours of the evening when the tribe

Mentioned names like monuments to the past
And the children sifted substance from jibe
In the annals of the long progenitive cast

Of archers, slingshots, colonnade makers

Crocodile wranglers, tongue athletes, amulet
Masons, ostrich breeders, zebra riders, rain conjurers,
Thunder catchers, fringe composers of the couplet,

Star-gazers, face readers, lie detectors, chanteuses

Architects, revue builders, wine tappers, loft
Builders, snake charmers, healers of bruises
And healers of bones, women of the craft.

65
XVII

Trojans like mescaline in the blood, the purple

Palaces of peyote in the brain, two thousand
Miles of Aztec dreams and those of the turtle
And this divining-chain, the infinite ampersand

Of dunes and psychedelic meteorites, Marinetti‘s furnace

Of syntax, the gelatine spread of mythscape
In sheep oyster-eyes over Wolof rice, the trace
Of Bafot grills, thrills trapped beyond escape

In Sahara-capsules where John the Anabaptist

Writes his germinal treatise on the lives of saints
And where the very last of the irredentist
Tribe proclaims the fatwa on the ‗taints‘

Who are us, contrarians, the colourful ones

From Mare Erythraeum to the Trab el-Hajra
From Tripolitania to that conurbation once
Known as Eko from before the Hijra.

Like sails on plumed sand-seas, like messages

In bottles, the call to gardening goes
Forth again and again, the quiet sages,
Chanteuses, griots, melting like ice floes

Into ravenous Sahara, cloudless at noon,

Earnest in the hunt for green September
Seedtime and harvest, the cyclic boon
Of rain, the pregnancy of yam camber.

66
XVIII

Among the ones that came to Assekrem

Was Father Foucauld. A seeker, he became
Hermit of the Hoggar digging up every gem
Available in the Touareg tongue until his fame

Passed into legend on the Oued, as friend

Of Haratin and the Hartani, as marabout
Come in search to Assekrem, the world‘s end
In the language of the Touareg. His table

Fed visitors to his bordj, regaled them

With translated myths of the Touareg;
The poetry and the lores of Assekrem.
He died learning the language of the reg.

To tell the ratio of what he read

To what he wrote required calculus
Of an inward kind, not the dead
Reckoning of alphabets in gain or loss

Too easy the fixed accretion of figures

When, shifting upon the heart, signatures
Carved on pericardium heals or injures
According to whim of recondite fixtures

Of human lottery. What was required

Was something of a matchmaker‘s art
And eyes that scanned as they inquired
Lodged deep within the human heart

67
With a watchmaker‘s precision in mensuration.
What was required was equal sympathy
For science and essence, the comprehension
Of music in one being that shatters apathy

Toward Tifinagh and Tamahaq, ancient scripts

Beloved of the oldest lovers of acrostics.
The world extends, refusing confinement to crypts
Resurrecting as Foucauld among the rustics.

XIX

In Djenné, I watched Irene ponder an avian mystery

A peacock’s iridescent colour without pigment;
Its fluent magic with light, its natural mastery
Of masculine tricks. ‘Can peahen tell figment

Of imagination from the truth?’ Irene asks

Mixing Spanish with English. I pause, then answer:
‘Only when the cock is dead.’ Worlds of masks
Matter for a season and then they cease to matter.

We leave for Fouta Jallon at Dawn, the quartz

Of that bright region welcoming trial by pastel
And oil. The heat festering, we drink quarts
Of plateau filtered water and find a hostel

To set our day in different diaries. Night

Modulates whispers from a hill’s distant youth
Where transient memories jostle out of sight
For warmth in sentient dreams too couth

68
For mention. Africa births her nations
Into a dry whirlpool of her own making
Ten thousand years, ten thousand stations,
A sniggering, Pharisee world ignores her aching.

XX

Married to camel latitudes and date palms

The Touareg roams the endless expanse of earth
Now deserted by game. He sings his psalms
Among vanished forests, his laments of dearth

In what was zebra meridians. Striped dreams

Retire, roped as phalluses in Arab urns
And Scipio becomes Africanus amid screams
Of nervous beasts and everything that burns.

Our history runs over with the human condition

Made worse or better by our striking crucible—
Our endurance or dissolute state. Earth‘s salvation
Or perdition our constant meditation, as incredible

As that notion appears. It is all very clear

How everything ends if nothing happens fast
To the dense heat hovering— extinction fear
Takes root in chasmal voids of the recent past.

Lone Atlas shares self-deprecating jokes

With its shadow in the cool of evening
As the western horizon lazily stokes
Dying embers of the sun. Their twining

69
Humour the staple of large entities
For a million years they have threatened laughter
But remained as cool as lions with identities
Intact in the surge and thereafter.

XXI

Mari Djata‘s peace, unperturbed by the ages

Knows nothing of the troubles of Timbuktu
Today. The Sankarini flows between passages
Of history toward the playground‘s green mantle

Where Touareg-harassed children, fleeing south

Learn that flags matter more than they say.
Their delight in hide and seek, in soft truth
Gives way to the harsh facts of the day:

More die from drowning than from thirst

In the Sahara. More die at the hands
Of neighbours hankering for their lands
Than they do from alien enemies. At first

Logic resists the plain contention of statistics

As flesh resists the doctrine of salvation from sugar.
What was scarcer here than the water?
Yet, death oftener comes in cloudburst ballistics

Than it does in the heat of sunstrokes

So that natives learn temperance and gauge
Weather with reverence, restricting folk jokes
Of floods to safe time zones of language.

70
 "Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun…"

— William Butler Yeats

CHAPTER IV

I
Arbaete Asmera. These words in depth and orbed dimension
Belong to a different age, to ancient Eritrean
Which stalwart land obsessed with the finest diction
That human tongue conjures. Speech egalitarian

As spirit that later lighted on France, littoral,

Lilting and sweet. The Sahara touched down
Here and a company rose, grew like coral
Into land and sea, the people, windblown

Scattered like cotton-tree seed. They became

History in the annals of many settled kingdoms
Inventing tools, diplomatic women, measured fame
And a bonsai resource of meanings and norms.

From Sebderat I made my way to Kassala;

A song of Nakfa on replay in my mind
Like smooth jazz— flight notes of an impala
Freeze-framed as music notation of a kind.

II

The vigour of a drover and his casuistry

Out on the fields and deep within his cave
Fails to scale the gradient of one mystery:
A woman‘s song in praise of the brave.

71
III

Mauritanian serirs, placid pebble seas of ellipsis

Offering granite hymns to the Negro dead,
Cainozoic incantations of mourning Isis
Surviving witnesses of those that fled.

And alab dunes, linked in soil solidarity

Stretching like Solzhenitsyn‘s Carpathians
Modelled in sand. The scaled disparity
Obscured at night as history by Parthians.

Nouakchott, Cenozoic city, Janus faced,

Inheritor of legacies from old Chinguetti,
Keeper of storied heirlooms that graced
Oualâta and Ouadane, distant Serengeti.

I wish I knew you better, Chemama,

Nestled by the Sénégal, I wish I knew
You better. Your friendly dark schema
Rippling with the fecund and the new.

For who can measure the length in seasons

Of slavery for a life? Who on earth
Presumes to know the many forms of treasons
Perpetrated against a people? Robbed of mirth

In a world that cherished sugar, cotton

Tobacco and house bondage, who could measure
Those horrid spans in seasons? What neat button
Ties the woolen coat of history‘s chest of treasure?

72
IV
For the children of Africa
Of all the gnats that swarm the world
Anopheles is worst. Of all the fates
That may befall it leaves you lying curled
And if help comes not very quick it wastes

Without a thought, and young or old

Or black or white it cares not very much.
And thanks to rising temperatures, what‘s cold
Will soon be warm. And everywhere as such

Becomes our foe anopheles. How very sweet

How very sound the song that this gnat sings.
How full the hospitals become each tweet
Our fell foe makes, her bites are pings

That can broadcast a range of harsh symptoms

Fever and cold, dengue and flu, elephantiasis
Anopheles and Pandora, they dance to two tom-toms—
And either you will dance along or be their nemesis.

Laid out between lead-bearing seams, Zamfara‘s gold

Is subterranean prisoner to daring and death
At whom the elders set their little children told
The sweetest fairy tales of mining wealth

73
For children know enough to try and free
Any prisoners that make them rich
But they never know enough to disagree
That riches cost nothing, as elders teach.

And so they walk into the clouds

Of retreat. Into lodes of mineral earth
And so they lick their mushrooming shrouds
Retracing brevity‘s arc in nanograms of dearth.

Zamfara‘s children fall like brown bottles

Broken at bright annunciation of dawn
And the elders press harder, their wattles
Like those of grey vultures. The noun

In each infant name is weighed down

Into leaden anonymity, the fading smiles
Of each child is the harsh and taciturn
Consolation of grieving mothers. The files

Multiply like casualty in government hospitals

Where baffled doctors improvise against the certainty
Of dying young. Death‘s theatre of paediatric recitals
Is here, in Zamfara, grim in its obscenity.

Hidden away from the elegant world that wears

The worked allure of metals. They wear the souls
Of children on their necks, too, their tears.
The multitude of dreams they wear turn ghouls.

74
VI

Here filming crews can shoot a Mars landing

Within a red horizon of crimson rocks and dust.
But beyond the red degrees lie the demanding
Harshness of this atmosphere abundant in rust

To which the light adds a foreboding hint

Every vivid sunset. It is a distant cry today
From Izon mangroves, the copper-deep tint
Wetlands wear lipstick in the fierce affray

Of green pastures and oil spills — which testifies

Against a gaudy century, stubborn as a leech,
Sucking at both ends her prey, humming lullabies
Of the devil‘s raptures. There is no speech

On the planet equal to the daunting task

Of recovery. Amidst red rain from here
To Catalonia and Navarre where the Basque
Benefit from a desert‘s bounty of red cheer

Springing from Algeria‘s heart, pledging undying

Love for every rouge piece of mother earth.
Red is the colour of tears, of children crying
From Mogadishu to Misrata where every birth

Is dangling death in the season of Black Dahlias

The desert‘s eastern easel paints the dawn
A brilliant russet, and the Sahara is an alias
For vermillion, for Arab and black pawn.

75
VII

Our hands brought the seeds of sweet melons

Up north from its cradle in the deepest south
Sowing and reaping, as farmers and as felons
Our hands brought Africa to every mouth

So that this morning, on Tassili‘s rugged height

Two artists share a bowl of fruit salad
Translucent with energy and liquid light
Enough to make a saint of a common cad

So that this afternoon in Sichuan, a merchant

Of seeds will smile to his piggy bank
With Yuan from vending magic elephant
Melons, straight from Africa‘s fecund flank.

And in Atlanta this miracle of nature

Wets as many throats as parched Georgia
Can bring to the feast of summer‘s rapture.
Our hands brought the melon to Virginia

Where field hands took it to Mexico, brought it

Back with them with hints of indigenismo
Topped with tierra fria flavours. The heat
Of Australia is hushed in the melon tango.

76
VIII

A lore‘s momentum gathers into sultry pursuit

Of history‘s high oratorical saddle, the rare
Rainbow of truth knots a tie, dons a suit
For a journey long and strange. Camel care,

Turn-key horseplay of whiskey characters,

Mendicants and merchants of the desert trail,
Warhorses, topographers, wits, wager mongers
Stragglers framing their instincts into a contrail

Of rescue workers like mist in a spreading crisis.

In this desert too are things born in the U.S.A
But coming late in time. The mirrors of Isis
Reflecting more of what they have to say:

Time kills. Lacking Showtime panache it appears

To most as healing without stethoscopes, morphine
Stretchers and the ambulance. It trades on fears
Profits aplenty from traffic of that smooth engine

Purring through the universe like roulette wheels

Part-time clergy, undertaker. Time here is passage
Through chapters of darkness as the bell peals –
Time is avenger, whistling wryly from the wronged page

Of history a tune accustomed to repetition

The meek, whistles time, lips pursed as purpose
Still inherit the earth in glaring contradiction
Of logic, Darwin and the grand dose

77
Of skeptic philosophy, sarakuna mores, primogeniture.
The women move from washtubs to temples
And children unlearn the paralysis of slanted orature
Talakawa speech garners spring in illustrated examples.

IX

Some nights the desert falls deep into coma

And travellers, their camels and donkeys know
All is a dream in black, a passage from Homer
Flecked with stars, soon forgotten in the flow.

In Nouadhibu, sun and sea hold smelling salts

To the nose of slumbering sands in a rite
Of stubborn revival. Like incense, the cobalt‘s
Spray traces passageways like a kite

Into the consciousness of plumed sunrise

Stirring griot and muezzin, suckling and crone
Into hymns of thanksgiving, stanzas of praise
For this, the ancients declare, is wise for the bone

That must return to earth and fellow elements

In repose or torment. Carbon-14, trace matter
Created and destroyed daily with complements
Of 21st-century cyclotrons, mad as a hatter

In search of anti-matter. Still the world‘s end

Remains far in the horizon; first, destroyers must halt
The making of poetry, the telling of tales, then bend
The bone of humour to breaking point, fault

78
The Maker‘s design for wit. They must find
Arrows to kill two gods, Cupid and Eros, nails
Adamantine to hold their coffins from the mind
Of humanity, dream-police with keys to jails

Where roaming ghosts are kept until their rendition

To secure locations. Finally, destroyers must invent
Dialects designed to keep the world from sedition
Issuing from playwrights, clowns in the circus tent

The favourite uncle, the doting, darling aunt

Who whisper ways for what needs doing
By other means, over coffee and croissant
But these are as many as pebbles going

Nowhere now, as numerous as the stars

And as luminous, as out-of-reach as mercury
So that hope endures amidst the wars
Of a world without end to wealth or usury.

A Babel of cicadas ruptured the night, Luxor

Sent them forth in frenzy, all night and day
The surrounding deserts witnessed a war
Aimed at the heart of Egypt. Thousands lay

Dead on both sides, tied to tongue of battle

Where smoke and steel, club and gore
Skirmished in caustic tones. Men and cattle
Turned food for carrion birds. Survivors swore

79
Black and Arab, in the heat of bloodlust
As they took to sand and sacked cities
Oaths on their lips mingling with dust
Retreating on horses and dromedaries.

XI

Listen: ‗Coelum non mutat genus.‘ Hogwash

That Darwin thought had gone. Not quite.
It thrives in hearts beholden to slush
Who maintain the lie as carapace of might.

XII

Ancestors here worshipped pantheons, then a lone God

Whose clemency they craved to survive and thrive
Seeing the desert ran from wadi to heated sod
Where even camels die and nothing can revive.

In the season of mushrooms and buxom storms

Hyraxes and men gather before freak weather
Can scatter. Reinforcing their shelters, their norms
As they must in the Sahara— the mother

Of all storms has made this place

Her playground, her own theme park
Where anything happens and terror has a face.
Still, nature is kind, crafting her own ark

80
Against the whims that elements conjure
So that the meek may still inherit earth
And plant and water the Sahara to pasture
The desert dreams greenness from the dearth –

Release for kidnapped scents of the tamarind

Runnels for the rain, soil deep enough for roots.
The desert dreams of gardeners, gentlemen, kind
Enough to plant a tree before they call it quits.

XIII

Ascending Tademaït at dawn with Ali Toure, the view

Grey with centuries of vanished savannah, the air
Brisk as bubble, clean as creation day— motion drew
Every planted step closer to heaven or a lair

And money shrank in the calculus of consciousness

In that present, breath mattered beyond telling
As Algeria emerged anew, all patrician sensuousness
Seen from that plateau as in a pose, slowly spelling

Her ancient names from an era gone, when hunter-natives

Turned artists and rendered buffaloes on rocks
As witness to a fecund range of fauna, the lost narratives
From the youth of the Maghreb. Tademaït unlocks

Mysteries beyond breathtaking moments for the Hasselblad

Of a time before all instruments, when the body was all
And lungs and eyes with feet and hands went glad
Together with adventure in its spirit-call.

81
XIV

Shall we forgive the State? Let us ask

Guermah Massinissa, once one of us
Passionate about his fathers, his filial task
To dialect— and his neighbourly thesaurus.

Let us ask him who was, youth martyred

For love of ancestry, the gift of speech.
Maligned in death, his very name bartered
By potentates to further an ancient breach.

In the clamour of tongues he was slain

Before Girona, before the common pact
Of scribes to honour every last crane
Flying off the tongue of human tact.

Massinissa, highborn Berber son, young chief

To whom a people owe the Black Spring,
The pure impulse of a summer‘s brief
Kiss, the song that sparrow-larks sing.

XV

Sudan, the kohl around your eye is timeless,

Ironical, foreboding and beautiful— breathing ceremony
Through oval passe-partout and mineral loveliness
That is as potent and fatal as antimony

82
Through sookh and slum, the gaze I now return
With a camera dogs, it is tireless, persistent
Constant as the omen in the air. You warn
Without lifting a finger, of something imminent

Something vague, mysterious as mastabas, yet open

To the gaze, remote as Meroe, yet instant
As the touch - a dread that may ripen
Always approaching, even as it is distant.

Infant as the cry of Darfuri children is,

Haunting as the permanence of their silence,
There is chillier fate in dreams and psychosis
As yet undiscovered in Khartoum. The pestilence

That wastes around the clock, that cracks

Foetal skulls with crude cluster bombs, the sickness
Hiding in smiling faces at soirees, that sacks
Villages for old women to rape in their weakness.

XVI

What measures of time and distance comprehends

The journey of salt into the realm of currency?
What minds first converted its crystal bends
Into money? We know there was no urgency

The transformation cooked itself like stone

In a forgotten river of the Sahara, made froth
From centuries of heated afternoons until it shone
With saline dissolution, white in the cooling broth

83
Which Pleistocene mankind reserved for taste.
It was good for blood, excellent for palate
And also good for barter. A caste
Emerged that hoarded it with ripe date

Mastered the art of keeping it pure and dry –

And because it kept longer than flesh or plant,
It served the tribe as value store. We try
For oil and gas today – variants of the old slant.

XVII

Poema, on the side of the angels

Is when the trumpet sounds, Sahara-wide
And the long and recent dead shake spells
Of death, and rise, and beasts collide

For sheer plenitude, and the surge of green

Revives the red earth. Poema is mastery
Of that jungle by man, from dense smokescreen
Into clean paradise of science and mystery

Where locusts break boughs sufficiently ripe

And lions prey only on buffalo tenderized
By age. Poema is the haunting pipe
Of a savage past, enacted and memorized

Forgotten by act of will. Peoma is freedom

From the tyranny of djinns, their bloody reign
Of ruin, their reckless, Masonic kingdom
Of coup and counter-coup, dearth of rain.

84
Yes, poema is making, pure untainted making
Yes it is medium, of gold and of breath
O yes, of sweat. It is macaronic waking
To a bright and peaceful day on earth.

XVIII

Dreaming of intersections in the sand, Mansa Musa

Traded exactly. His wealth grew with the wobble
Of the earth’s axis en route Medina where his accuser
Fledgling inquisitor, waits with a day-old stubble.

XIX

All gossamer light, irrevocable as the spoken word

Zlitan‘s iconography haunts the infant morning
Bullet ridden, brutal, a city bearing a sword
Seeking forgetfulness in the sun where a warning

Saunters against green-book fallacies, raw juice

Of power plants, botox and plastic smiles.
At the nude crossroads of Libya, the muse
Salsa-steps with Zlitan, and for many miles

Their dance wipes the mist from wind-screens

Putting precious hours in the urn, igniting tales
Replete with the saltpetre of battle screams.
Convoys convey the dynasty to separate vales

85
Of the high Libyan plateaus, a pink tide surges
After them in the twilight baying for blood
With imprecations for muted ethnic purges
And the spayed hopes of a muliebral horde.

XX

Tomb-raiders break unguarded vaults for smoke

And idiot-gold. They cart slumbering curses,
Carve a hole in time‘s repose. Their tools spoke
Of urgent quest for ease, as lean purses

Clamoured for coins from caskets of fallen kings

There is never enough in the coffers of thieves
And greed conjures daydreams of golden rings
Lapis lazuli, diamonds, the crown-jewel of Thebes.

XXI

I think of what you would have made,

Pasternak, of this view from Adrar‘s peak
What weight a quatrain, what subtle trade
Between metaphors as they richly streak

Through that prism of your mind, poet

Of the resurrection and the life, prophet
Filled with visions untranslatable as the duet
Of binary Sothis, emissary I clothe in velvet.

86
And would these have moved Akhmatova, steeped
As she was in unnamable human suffering?
Would she have had a word that reaped
These bounties beyond the bounds of ordering?

Shunning rivalry, Pasternak, I wondered in my mind

If Mayakovsky had come along, how great the joy
To words in youth, together when you made your find
Of spatial innocence, in harmony as boy to boy.

XXII

Here is harsh poetry, not as leaf to tree

But as weathered, moving dunes— grey tumuli
Rippling from Cronus‘ cove by time‘s decree
Through mountain country to the Nile‘s nautili

Range of reeds, crocodiles and ancient feluccas

Ferrying songs and dreams of long departed nations
From Lake Turkana and Kivu, up laborious Atlas
Tumbling down mongrel slopes of Ksour as Dalmatians

Where the song-wish of children for new rain

And their fragrant rendition of vanished freight
Trains, iron chariots bringing spoil and grain
Of empire into fancy-famished heads of eight.

Reeds along the Delta of the Nile, their hue

A thing of beauty in the rising sun, rare flowers
Full and fallen, curing the marsh they imbue
All summer with hints of summary powers.

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XXIII

They say the only illness of the desert

Is madness. A great truth, verity little known
As thin as that membrane of the heart
As difficult to cure once infected. On its own

Seeking not the company of men or beast

The desert mutters silent litanies of wrongs
Repressed joys, erased hopes that was yeast
Prospect that was aroma of victory songs

In solitude, honing bone-deep hatred

Growing colour-blind, spurning overtures of rain
Rewriting biographies of trees in whose stead
Gnarled revenants remain. The desert is diary of pain.

XXIV

A cave is another conversation with time

In the heart of Gilf Kebir, deep architecture
Made for one Cinderella in her prime
Sans silhouette, sans equations and conjecture

Regarding origins – she was the village beauty

Her Rembrandt the resident artist for a season.
Their conversation spills across centuries of duty
To the memory of man and another reason:

88
Ten vanished rivers, coursing through sandstone country:
Trophies of the hunt in the valley of boars,
Life as it was before the age of pectorals, the gentry
Of giraffes gracing the wide plateau. The roars

Of lions roaming fields of Libyan glass

Shimmering with sunrise, worrying waking herds
Of herbivores. Petroglyphs leave out the mass
Of carnivores in their nooks, wishful thinking shepherds.

XXV

Sahara sighs, nostalgic for new moon, for clean pleasures

And the old moon of a lost age, the age of Chaucer
Before plutonium isotopes and yellowcake treasures
When it was right to sip from a silver saucer.

The desert drifts with the dream of purity

Into the embrace of night, into kindled memories
Of frost and green and fauna. The celerity
Of sunbeams at dawn, before gun smoke and cavalries

The consternation of uranium, the leaking whispers

Of spymasters, of cold warmongers, dandy scientists
Regular as metronomes, after every metal that prospers
Every mineral and liquid likely to interest actuarists.

One generation, and Sahara transforms from silent garden

Into busy inventory of implacable gatherers, noise merchants,
Tails of capital in remote cities. Sahara turns midden
Pitiful as space, full of debris, the Golgotha of angry chants.

89
XXVI

Chad is a memory of gills with a present

Inside receding lakes, a frilled past of nets
Cast for harvest at a time of merriment.
Chad‘s counties cast as dice, placed as bets

In a wager against the alchemy of winds

Chad is that country of citizens made rich
And poor by a haul of hues of many kinds.
Chad is a mood, chronic as an itch

A rhizome, reserved for a time of want.

Answer, Chad, what music moves
Your feet the most? What musical instant
Soothes your weary, hankering hooves?

Legends of your horsemen spread abroad, their vigour

Their colours bold, their horses made of history
All storied, noised above the cantering torpor
So that the land lives, obdurate as memory.

Lighting their own corners of constant conversation

And all we hear are whispers as of candles
Made audible within a dream of spiral elation;
The stream of silence sings a lullaby, dandles

Our bodies through apocalyptic noise while whispering

The sufficiency of earth and its peace. This cocoon,
Kind to infant mankind, is made for enduring
Like the singer‘s song. We are children of the moon

90
Camped out in the Sahara‘s death-zone
Stoic is our waking resolve in the morning
To reclaim the earth and grow grace from stone
Enough for dwarves and giants in joy and mourning.

XXVII

Only now relearning to harvest with the waning rains

To plant and mulch resistance to drought perennial,
Only now forgiving totems fed with scarce grains
Through tortured chasms, psychedelic and millennial

The witness does not wholly sleep, only dozing

In necessary doses, the witness keeps a leash
On night and rampant riots that keep closing
In on Birmingham‘s burning shoulder. A wish

Taunts the witnessing eye with an inscription:

YOU‘LL SLEEP THE BIG SLEEP, SOMETIME
And the witness, hardened past superstition
Looks askance, pondering the fitting rhyme.

They come as shape-shifters, playing hide

And seek in the Maghreb twilight. Humour,
Grit and passion— crystalline choices, wide
Spaces in between, sufficient for camp-rumour.

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XXVIII

Field deaths. From a bullet in the eye,

Shrapnel in the guts, gas in the lungs.
Death from pellets, from a shattered thigh
Crude deaths and clean, death with prongs

Strafed limbs, sickled innards of men

Seen and smelt, touched and also felt.
This was death, writ large, engulfing the ken
Of salt grasses witnessing how men melt

In Sahara heat under enemy fire

The grim stages of crushing manifests
In a drama of death and the dire
Art of slim survival on a terrain that tests

Resolve. Struggling through gun smoke and dust

Diesel exhaust, methane fumes from dug trenches
Where twisted metal greets who comes first
On whom fate tests the wrenches.

XXIX

Who would imagine that the martial could be so avuncular

But that was the secret of Montgomery and his hardy men
Ranged against a Teutonic horde, eminent and stellar.
In the sands of Libya, the Blitzkrieg lost to Bren

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Old Blood-and-Guts, ruthless in his day, ally of England
Fought his Axis foes. He read the books of Rommel
Rode his crest of war, mustering up a mean command
Routed their retreat. Der Wüstenfuchs on a camel

Master of the Cauldron, his brightest hour behind him

Survived the enfilade. Patton, vivacious in victory
Sent a message to Wādī al-Akārīt, brief as a whim:
‗I read your manuals.‘ The hermit in his refectory

Reconciles the legend and his hollow, beaten self

A different kind of Socrates, mulling a failed coup
In a cup accompanying new hemlock. His bookshelf
Is a memory, on the masonry, a posse of pigeons coo.

XXX

‗George Germanicus on alien soil‘ intoned the apparition

‗I have come from Audaghost, a city of memory lost to rename
You. It is fate that routs, not war’s tendon or ammunition
Nor petulant soldiers.‘ The general woke, made to blame

His crowded mind but paused— pondering the agnomen.

So on the morning of battle, going against his vision
Germanicus took stock of men and munition, no omen
Sufficed to win a war against the Reich. Each division

Received its ration of steel and powder, settled to fight

To the last man at Patton‘s command. The bullhorn
Complained all morning with orders into the night
Then there was silence. Each man became reborn

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Into very Bushido, a mighty conflict waited in the wings
And history‘s scribes all come to the dry theatre
Of guts and the vicious desert fox as the sand sings
A dirge for the many that will fall before the vesper.

The eminence of a blustery Bedouin dawn

Sifts through the purdah of the night. Daybreak
And Patton’s army trades a poisoned pawn
Together with a posse of what can wreak

Havoc in the jaws of a surprised Panzer fleet

There is no cocoon in the desert, save the scorpion’s
Whose young weans itself from the thin pleat
A brutal anatomy attends the desert’s minions.

94
 ‗…I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one.‘
— Kamala Das
CHAPTER V

I
Leila’s psalm
Leila, you have made my heart a trap
For octopi, your beauty and your sigh
As twin ladders reaching up into the sky
Leave me staring between the gap.

Your smile is gold of a lamp-lit room

Soft as velvet of Massawa, it is
Perfume of Asmara, blend of bliss.
But also, your night-song is doom

To sleep, it is insomnia. Your voice

Is that intoxicant of which they spoke
The young men, whose hearts you broke.
Your hair is the ruin of Assab boys.

Queen of moon games, essence of repose

Leila‘s song stirs among the rushes soft
Warm as milk, fragrant as the rose
Growing placid among dates, tender as tuft

Of dew-fed grass. She‘s a soothing sight

For my strabismic eyes, lotus of the desert
Magic is her touch, transport to the height
Of dream, where chance strikes concert.

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Leila with lingering laughter like the stream
She of the smile transparent and tinkling
Delight of Denakil, jasmine dream
Returning with her goats in the evening.

Her song soothes the herd into rest

It opens sesame in the stone fields
Leila charms the sunrise from the west
Makes it blush in the open skies she wields.

She is fair as fortune, the wind whisks

Her hair in salsa overtures
She is beautiful in the way she frisks
With bramble twigs. The lowly creatures

Believe she‘s raising Lazarus from the dead

Because she can do anything. She is dance.
She brings to life beyond the span of bread
And cheese. She is yea and remonstrance.

Her feet add dimensions to dance, her voice

Raised in song is joy. The desert hosts a wedding
Of a Berber prince and his demure Touareg choice
They are comely, their perfumed robes streaming

In the idiom of the night. The desert tribes

Cheer them in the dance, the drummer
Makes them friends, the music describes
A celluloid scene too sultry for summer…

96
II

The warrior‘s art of the wooden horse

Left Troy for M‘Kratta. There it drowned
Promptly in sand, and so, another, Morse,
Arose, letting Paris in, to be crowned.

And the ladies loved Paris, for he

Among men is fair and most handsome
Also, his aim is sure, whatever it be
Bringing quarry home and ransom.

Here are the fields where grows the grains

Which feed the strutting Gallic cock
Here are the tracks that bear the trains
From field to port around the clock:

Sahara steel, Sahara salt, Sahara manganese

Sahara tin, Sahara oil, Sahara phosphorus.
Sahara gas, Sahara stone, Sahara oases
Sahara tar, Sahara chrome, legacy of the Tibbus.

III

Past the cure of silver bullets, my bald Sahara

Waits upon her day under a friendlier sun.
It was mentioned, beneath stars in their candelabra
Once to a dreamer by a migrant dream on the run

97
That a man possessed by blossoms will someday rise
To plant ten thousand flowers at pining Menaka.
Perhaps it was he, the messiah of stalled surprise
Father of unlikely bees from blue-tinged Akar-Akar.

The dreamer found refuge in the sourness of milk

Therein finding strength to climb the massif Jahalra
Where tramontane fields scented the air like silk
To soothe the taint of sulphur from forming Tahalra.

Winds trafficked without definition in the cool

Of evening like tag-team partners drunk. An oasis
Would be worth a country here, water in a pool
Worth the world‘s paper wealth or a fond kiss.

But earth was always more than the gathered sum

Of its many parts. So the dreamer dreamt at last
Of wild perfume and a gentle breeze over arum
Lilies, bright stars, the one girl from his past

He never thought would come into his arms

Dipping in the moonlit water with a song
From another time and place. Such charms
Led him beyond bliss until the sunrise stung.

Now to the halls of Khety to hear again the eloquence

Of the farmer. Bold as truth, he confronts the caper
Of a corrupt courtier, he declaims the permanence
Of Justice, the pricelessness of good as a river

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Flowing to the humble of the earth, curing dryness
Filling the hands of the poor, curing hunger.
How pleasant and how great is goodness
When it answers to nature, removing danger

To the wanderer, so the soul will not stray

Flowing only to the place of nurture;
So she does not stumble on the road of yesterday
Finding guidance in stars and rapture.

IV

Light springs from its far eastern fountains

Across the affluence of the Sahel, ploughs multiply
And worker bees become reclusive as the rains
Make rainbows with the orient light. The lie

Of the serpent echoes in the fields

Where cannon balls echo as they fly
Knocking mortality into men, the shields
They bear powerless against what makes them die

The voice of Eve is heard, lifted in lament

The slaughter threatens abatement in the flash
Of nuclear fission, holocaust, the permanent
Evaporator. Offerings of reason fail to wash,

Sin entered the scene, somewhere, along the path

And the sower reckons fitfully in his dreams
With the owner of the field, his wrath
And the multitude of the damned, their screams.

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V

There is no Christmas in their trees, no sea

In their horses. There is not a single drop
Of water in their beds of December, no tea
In their cups. There is no harvest, no crop

On their frigid plains of approaching January

And voices disperse in the harmattan as pollen
Obeying the summons of their urgent augury.
Their chiliast hand slaps defenseless women

And their paradox sails home on jet fuel:

These are not the same as Boko Haram,
Right? These jolly ministers are not as cruel
Their ivory towers of naira and their ashram—

Mere purple geometries in place of blood.

There is queer logic in the granary of limbs
Found in slaps that leave lasting contrails. Mud
That made man hardly suffered so, wimps

Will argue but the truth remains. Our clergy,

Our healers, our poets and people of culture—
Many that should help our creeping lethargy
Instead explain this frothing gruel of strange rapture…

100
VI

Tulips were in season in that oasis, pure

Mystery how they came to be, how they survive.
No sputnik saw them or their hidden cure
For long monotony, brown boredom. Don‘t deprive

A child their wonder, do not risk children

For their dangerous allure, these flowers wild
Will thrive forever, with kestrel and wren
Wasps, bees and butterflies. The mild

Winged insects of these enclaves keep constant guard

Over the tulip patch. There is magic here
Where they grow– side by side with mustard
O never deprive a child their sight of cosmic cheer

Nestled in the oasis, out of sight of satellites

Feeding birds and bees and flies and gnats
With mustard-spiced tulips. Black kites
Circle overhead on thermals ahead of bats.

VII

Steady hooves of cantering horses a thousand strong

Every one with a human burden, sanguine
Sallying forth to distant battle. War is wrong
And the horses know, battle worn equines.

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VIII

Said the desert: all the things you heard

About me are only partly true. Verity
Is as odd as make-believe baked hard
Beyond the reach of lies and morbidity.

Time, Einstein‘s cheetah, slows to a killing crawl

And beast by beast surrenders to the heat
Until saurian princes with their tempered drawl
Alone remain with vipers untainted by defeat.

They will stay the noon-course of future times

Coming in place of floods that killed their kind
Having learnt to plead their innocence to crimes
That sent the wailers wailing in the wind.

The map of the desert is a massive tome

Of wealth in terms of things invisible
It is an encyclopaedia of things to come
The manifest of things implied impossible

In the camp of French legionnaires, asparagus

Soup is served with dinner to the men
Their taste of Europe with the wine and juice
Preserved until departure or death. Amen.

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IX

Out on the fields of Fezzan to find Fibonacci,

The company cuts through tangled treaties
Eminent oases, blunt borders, outposts of Vichy
France, where oil and champagne parties

Happen like vespers. At last

In a place as close to camel heaven
As the earth can be, stretching vast
As the horizon, date palm, woven

With the symmetry of history‘s finger

Into the fabric of the desert‘s dun pelt
So that at sunrise, evoking song in singer,
Creation pitches into colour, turns temporary Celt

And the landscape, thoroughly Touareg,

Sings of hardihood and of reprieve, of beauty
Among ashes, of ergs and primordial reg.
Thus is truth found, in situ, from duty.

The perforated shadow of a cell-phone mast

Shifting with the sun, teaches Saharawi lessons
To desert rats of the Maghreb. The past
Is never past to narrow-minded hawks. What lessens

103
Perhaps is the succour of circumstance, the thin
Shade of man, the fleeting, complicated maze
Of human contraptions. So rats look within
For rat salvation. Only hawks can afford to laze.

Riding thermals of sea and morning sun

The hawk resolves: as for me and my nest
We will hunt vermin. However fast they run
Wherever to. From sunup till we go to rest.

So goes the rhythm of living in the fierce heat

Which is life by a sultry name, hiding
And seeking of hunter and prey, feat
Of survival performed each time a diving

Raptor misses mouse. Time sharpens

Instincts and claws, reminds the embryo
Of beats in the rhythm of what happens
With chemical precision and brio.

XI

A boy born to the desert‘s odd turns,

He learnt to rendezvous with the oasis
The mirage, rumours, the girl that spurns
Shy advances (they are best for symbiosis)

His levee of pure creation breaks, Cassiopeia

Tumbles down in a million buttons of light
And the shimmering Nile brims with tilapia.
Crop after crop he harvests through the night:

104
Astronomical tales, migrant compte rendu
Of a people dispersed amidst a sprawling legend.
Cleopatra comes to mind, so much ado
About empire, dynasties that find their end

In asp coves, anecdotized with passage

Of time into the darkness that, atomized,
Leaves the best explorers of the age
Quizzical. And the once-boy lionized.

XII

Receiving the harmattan in translation, old Oyo shivers

Under blankets of cotton and linen, the tinder
Dry air thins rain-clogged lungs, turning rivers
Into cold liquid barriers. Grass burns to cinder

Wild fires spread like plagues, dust like talcum

Settles on everything in sight. The harmattan translates
Rainforests into a brown season void as a vacuum
Where deciduous things shed green until the void abates.

XIII

Mornings and the daily rituals of washing,

Of steel carriages called cars across the land
By rich and poor, the ugly and the dashing.
They wash as worship, assorted rags in hand

105
Contraptions they do not make. Mobile miracles,
Fibre-glass avatars, sculpted plastic dreams.
These chrome-plated automata, mandalic vehicles,
Consume their offerings daily, basking in streams

Of sweat and water from proselytes. They gleam

With wax from dutiful hands, gather allure
For one more day of driving in the steam
That is Lagos, Kaduna, Makurdi and Akure.

They are incarnate, anatomical dividends of petroleum,

Depreciating deities, yet symbols of a world
Fitted for transport. They pose until the rheum
Comes with tragic timing to eyes whorled,

Mesmerized around the gliding wheels of progress.

Perhaps the people have been deceived,
These gods of scrap heaps, they say, mean success –
So they wash and wax the vision received.

And yet there are the abject others

Who keep car-vigils on moonless nights
Washing their god’s ski rails and udders
It’s true. Their neuroses have known those heights.

XIV

The night stirs amid verbal parentheses of two

Conversing voices, they recount their week
In little gatherings that endured buffeting, too
Solid to fear loss. Their words play hide and seek

106
Through consciousness and twinkling master stars
Busy with the business of being. The universe
Tests for kitsch in the floating barge of scars
Randomly written as tomes by old philosophers

The night stirs within levitating quote marks

Adorned with whispers, festooned with hand gestures
Marking boundaries, always, between word-quarks
In the collider that is cosmos. The night sutures

Manifold torn hopes and shattered dreams

All in the regaling, the dye of night seeping
Deeper into the fabric from the seams
Until their talk falters out of keeping.

XV

‗Read my lips‘ said the talking drum

In the harmattan. What trembles is my heart
And not my skin. They say that mum
Is the word, that the tiny wart

On her dry face is nothing, is benign,

That fear walks the streets in phantoms
Alone, that the mortal plosives are not design.
Said the talking drum: Five full fathoms

Embrace the motherland. Of her soul is crude

Oil made, and of her spirit gas,
Five flammable, decadent decades (with an interlude
So brief the people didn‘t see it pass.)

107
Read. My. Lips. A famous convict lies in jail
Abroad, and many roam free at home
Who belong with certainty somewhere beyond the pale.
Read. Or feign to read that toothless tome.

XVI

Bouazizi’s brood – they burned themselves and toppled

Serpentine dynasties, their wounded pride like darts
Pierced caged bubbles of lying power, the settled
Throne of dictatorships overthrown by lighted body parts.

108
 The Atlantic Interval

Annals of the Gambia

James Island:

That frozen phallus of a cannon stares

Endlessly upon a fecund, ageless sea.
Witness trees, weather beaten and gnarled
Affinitize with the elements,
Whispering the songs
Of Neptune when the wind is high.
This is James Island,
Spartan as the sun
Where the fittest marched in chains to merge
With futures alien as the skin of shipmasters.

History was here, woven into syntax

Of the rolling, intrepid waves. History,
Ghostly now and fading, was here
Material as the mineral of the sea.

109
II

There is a dappled song of rust

Trembling in the stricken throat
Of silenced guns,
There is a russet song of sorrow
Whimpering
Upon this beachhead of the Middle Passage.
The very soil of the Island hums the song
When the last tourist must have left
Echoing the sorrow of the song in shades
Incandescent and tortured as memory.

And you can hear this Island lamenting and lost

Haunted like the eyes of scattered children
Seeking shelter in a strange and rattled world
Thrust out at turns by traitors and aliens.

110
III

Here, Fofana, friend of all my fathers,

Still inhales the Atlantic
Mingled with the scent of Kambiya Bolongo.
Conjuring ruptured memories, singing
A long song of this vanishing island
Strumming the khalam and the drum
For drums speak the language of spirits
And khalam‘s music is the ransom for lost souls…

King Niumi‘s Island, St Andrews Island, Fort James.

So many names for one island of sorrow
So many wars to own a phantom in the end.
Our congeries tend the tripod of hope
As tourists survey the remnants of the Island
Like probe instruments on a strange planet.

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IV

We exhale with the metals on this anniversary –

Metals of cannons, ores of cannon balls.
We exhale with metals laid to rest, metals
On the pyre of the sun. Sighing metals
Strangled of speech, steel of human resolve.
We join a century of metals exhaling here
And each shaft of the sun sings as we
Exhale. A choir of the cosmos joins the hymn.

And now, Fofana, friend of all my fathers,

Let us inhale with the trees, the grass
The very island and the sea. And strum
The silent khalam, muse of living souls,
Muse of redemption. Strum
Beyond the sighs and sorrows and the pain.

112
 II
INFINITE LONGINGS

113
CHAPTER I
‗I
must be given words to shape my name
to the syllables of trees.‘
— Kamau Brathwaite

We own Tajudeen, e get as dis leta nor easy

To write to una. Man nor fit cry, man try
Man nor fit stop. Man eyes be like busy
Road. Plenti pain. Man nor fit cry

Like pikin. Man try, man nor fit, man pikin

Just nor fit stop. Man travel go Funtua
Pipole for dere dey cry. Di pain na one kain
How pesin go fit write am? Man go Wusasa

We own Taju, na di same tin. Dis kain laif

Wey we dey live so, mout nor fit talkam
Ground nor level, sufferhead and im waif
Don born plenty pikin for we contri like cocoyam

Naija pikin, Africa pikin, dey try organize

E don tay wey we don dey suffer
Time don reach now to stop agonize
Make contri pikin dem tanda proper.

114
II

Crossing swords with Carbon-14 dates, the museum

Of natural history in Niamey resurrects a dinosaur.
What fed that beast? What prey paid premium
Price? How glad Tenere should now be that power

No longer flows from carnivore diktat? What man

Is there so free from muscled terror now?
Will appetite now fail to gobble what it can?
Though hominid, is one not lion and the other cow?

A hundred million years and yet the terror still

Of suits in pursuit of the golden sweat
That raises skyscrapers and treasuries of steel,
Dealing in hunger despite wasting wheat.

Millions watch the skeletons of terrors past

They drink their water quietly and eat couscous
Assured that terrors end however long they last
And meekness wins, and nothing different does.

III

The botany of oases is a science all its own

Which Father Christmases study, it is a sphere
Of symphonies in green and red and mown
Gold. Juniper survives with dates here,

115
And date-defying moss. Pollen so ancient
Teratornis incredibilis must have tasted it;
Plants with music apart from the transient
Music transfigured by silence, gentle, starlit.

Children of the oases, raised on milk and dates,

Cornmeal, yoghurt, bread, berries, meats and play—
Their dreams are filled with stars and gates
Opening beyond charmed circles aquifers essay.

They seek all year, all weather, for grass,

For green. They have left hookah-smokers
Behind in tents, Aladdin‘s lamp of brass
For shepherding upon the plains and boulders.

IV

A star prattles at the edge of night vision

Over a vanished city. In its day it bustled
With commerce, philosophy, the aspiration
Of young cities where new agendas tussled.

It was the kind of city where a man could post

A letter at midnight, to parliament, to his lover
The kind of city of which the people boast
Of women in the driving seat, reading Revulva.

This generation, sky-divers all, fond nectarholics

Dare for riches in rocks and seas, all things
Ambrosial. They are gods, aware in their frolics
Of being and destiny, of wind beneath wings,

116
The limit of pigments. Alas, they are mean,
Necklacing thieves and suspects, are pirates
Buccaneers, vultures, daemons and axmen
At whom the inferno tugs, also the fates.

Waking dunes majestic as music of tidal waves

Frozen on the rims of sight, their crests
And sedimentary troughs of rolling caves
More picturesque than distant liquid vests

Of the sea. The scattered clemency of oases

To man, camel and horse, the green garnish
On a feast of golden erg, life‘s parentheses
In the desert‘s epic telling of long clannish

Wars of winds and sun and truant rain.

Desert nights conduct symphonic truce
Wearing Moroccan leather, the refrain
Is a nuanced diminuendo, playing loose …

Robed in red like a Martian, Saharanesis Tauris

Stirs in its Anaerobic dream. A million years
Has passed in this enlightened state and is
Confident of nothing but its own perennial fears.

117
VI

Far too fricative, the gathering distant storm

Sending shreds of warnings to tourist intentions
Through ears and teeth enamel. Repose is norm
The body knows, regardless of new inventions

Promising protection, armour against the elements.

Freedom is the song on the lips of the wind
Kindling the wattage of clouds, flattening tents
Throwing sand boomerangs for itself to find.

Long before any cannons, before any taunting dreams

Of sleep in their open mouths, long before housed
Aspirations, the age of tents, treks and animal screams –
An elder woman owning a voice that roused

Prophesied of the coming of Phoenicians and then she died.

There was an age of ice between that prophecy
And grim fulfilment. A thawing sea cried
A little louder from the ordered heresy

Of Assyrian oars. Their coming was determined

Like a sea cavalry‘s, and their faces shone
With embers from another sun as yet unexamined
They made their way through one death zone

After another, theirs was the first real menace

To threaten the elements. The monstrous competence
Of the galley-dwelling soldiers was stuff for Horace
And when they landed, speech raced into the present tense.

118
VII

A hermit‘s patch of pumpkin skirts the oasis

Where, to better watch the stars he dwells
With his dreams reckoned in the gaze of Sothis
Learning the language of light, not what sells.

Light was language and song, Bafot fishermen

Plying the Mega Chad‘s metamorphic dream
Found solace in tilapia, prayers, the Amen
Spread over speech like affirmative cream.

The sextillionth star, acetylene point in the sky

Corrals astrologers, whose births were reckoned
With falling meteorites. Mapping with naked eye
Provinces among the stars they claimed beckoned.

VIII

Going from Ghana to Senegal by road

With Ayi Kwei Armah‘s Two Thousand Seasons
Oppressed by heat and the brutal load
Of fiction that was fact, I found reasons

Between loose borders, to fault the fallacy

Of the four seasons, and of the two.
The one where no rain falls, its truancy
As long as recorded history. What is true

119
Of the heart that reckons is not numbered
It is a different degree beyond known reckoning
Of the soul in iron, of hope encumbered
Blighted beyond darkness, servitude or pawning.

IX

Daunting as longhand of the Meroe, pyramids

Pose rooted riddles to all archaeologists
Digging through beds of time for seeds
That may germinate, help philologists

Grapple with annals of a vanished race –

Three thousand scrolls but no Rosetta Stone
To save their written memories from disgrace
(Insular cultures have a burden to atone)

A bargain with realists of the dunes, balanced

Lightly on their travelled feet, tuning
Traditions of bush, the frenzy spoken and danced
Self-consciously into spaces, continuing.

Tonight, the city of Timbuktu lies in lunar dust

Sorrow at her exiles grieves her soul
She is that widow in sackcloth who must
Shave, bathe in ash from head to sole.

120
Her streets verily ricochet the echo
That speaks of violence and wounded pride,
Of youth and nightmare. She is the bride
Bereaved, the violated. She is the gecko

Silenced with stripes on the walls of history.

Her ancient streets, now stricken with insurrection
Bucks beneath the unaccustomed burden. The jury
Is out: which century answers her final question?

Still, Timbuktu rises in the light of dawn

Her labour, her tears, her every crying done
She raises her fist, defiant as the sun
And for her children fights till she has won.

XI

Enter their ecstasy like a silent discothèque strobed

Throbbing with pulse and true Technicolor
Tassili‘s vanished race of rock artists probed
Beyond abundance to the heart of splendour

Brown men and their herds of beasts driven

Heading south in a mighty farewell, they move
In broken symmetry of tortoise and hare, given
Little grace from hunters that harry and shove.

121
XII

A sheet of poetry like an exhumation order

Issued from a sand-buried city of old
Trembles in the winds. Across the border
Archaeologists work backwards in the cold

From Ghana‘s present to a buried past

With trowels of inquest. Earnest coroners,
They cross latitudes of urns so vast
To enter Mauritania as virtual loners

Where empire does not write back, it claims

With a savage eye, marching drunk, it casts
Its gaze to places sand can reach, declaims
The potency of tradition which outlasts

The puny magistracy of laws. This empire

Of sheer wind, booming gold dust, heraldry
Of halophytes, this harsh realm of sun so dire
Salt remains in solid state a complete century.

On their tongues, the word abid runs like a shuttle

They say that she is slave and born of slaves,
That her sweat is sweet, that she can hurtle
Distances beyond the reach of thought or waves

But wisdom makes room in Mauritania for the Moor.

And provides a stanza for the very dark.
Unfurls a wide tent for the very poor.
Or Lazarus will set alight the park.

122
XIII

Sit. N‘Djamena bids you to. In a remote, capacious library

Nothing official, it belongs to another age. Two volumes
Of Rumi beckon, a dozen poets, one treatise on apiary
There, where penumbral annals of the tribe loom.

Our lives of labour and quiet renunciation

Of all that man and camel cannot carry
Lasted four thousand years – no exaggeration
We learnt the voluptuous art of the story.

Soon the bluster of wind shrouding plain

Blurring distance, fraying nerves, shall pass
And calm, soothing in its stead, make gain
Stare serene upon empty space and mass

Of immobile dunes, sand staid and unshifting

Perched on the edge of the southern limits
Of the Sahara, where goat herds, slow-drifting,
Flow in viscous patterns of grazing bits.

XIV

Precious, this dream of catholic girls, failed nuns,

Jewels of the twilight indulged in dance,
Whose every step is Occitan, whose rested guns
Raise the downpressed with schlicht brisance.

123
Precious, the temper of their weathered frocks
Worn well, suited to travel and the open gaze.
They rise with the earliest bell, pray, tie their locks
Like Indian Goths, spreading in the sun to laze.

XV

The desert nibbles at asphalt like black chocolate,

Relishes slight reductions behind its mask of breeze
Like a tame scavenger. Digestion is the fate
Of what man offers here for his own ease.

To the migrants, the desert was the face

Of that hidden museum of hellish inquisition,
Lacking all kindness, compassion and grace
Impervious to the merits of calm disquisition.

The people find their artist in Irene

As the landscape does. Both grow
Warmer with her colours, more serene
With every passing year. Mali‘s brow

Finds the stroke of solid presentation

Through her Spanish eyes, her apt hands
Able to render history and situation:
Capable of art that also understands.

Mali, I can almost tell, misses her brushes

When the furlough claims her, the simple
Faces of women working while hers flushes
With exertion in the heat, dry and ample

124
As the generosity of sand and sun.
The boatmen of Mali miss her too
Who have learnt that art can also stun
With accuracy and with power true.

So strictures are constantly defeated

With tantric mysteries of the dark
Where language shifts for the many depleted
Understandings of touch singing with the lark

Of colliding clouds that rupture into rain

When night tempts with its lush millionairedom
And the breeze is like balm on the brain
Luring to sleep with its reckless freedom.

XVI

She won‘t carry on the quarrel beyond the house

Of corrections, in her heart, the old virtue
Of old testament wives, rules the black blouse
And bodes no bodkin, brooks no adulteration of value.

The doyenne lights a candle for late supper

Spreads clean tablecloth at the edge for two
Lays the china like porcelain tarot. A copper
Kettle brimming with green tea, steamed blue

Tuna with bread, an ivory saltshaker so ancient

It reeked of mammoth memory. Platonic tension
Played the evening like a stringed sitar, the orient
Bubbling up from mannered sleep, no overt mention

125
Is ever made of that predilection for seafood
Which the table shoulders like a wooden Hercules
These many miles from home, victuals assuage the mood
For a season, of his other lion hankering for peace

In the sumptuous feast hidden from the gaze

Of the lone candle light. They eat in silence.
The silence eats them, for nothing can daze
Like sublimated longing or a wakeful conscience.

XVII

Wind-breasting crickets, armoured copper knights

Disturb the evenings pleasantly with music
Of their feet. Many are the desert nights
That thrill with their symphonic tonic.

XVIII

Hammerite chords from a desert‘s music scale

Taunt dance to surface from a joyless face
Full of facts, to another realm beyond sale
Or purchase, patient as the suffering race

Of the monumental Sudan where soon

9 million bicycles ferry dreams on land
And the laughter of children is added boon
To bivouacked blackness numerous as sand

126
Claiming the country of ancestors as heirs
Rightful, beyond the claims of bayonets
Or swords, redeeming the times with peers
Of blood and milk. Placing young bets

Against the run of genocide, as the tide turns

At crossroads of history‘s coda. Another journey
Begins for land and people, whose progeny returns
With substance worth much more than money

Wherein it was impossible, in good conscience, to state

‗Hic nullus est defectus.‘ Too many pages blanked
From memory‘s house of scripts, the fate
Of many lost in this continent outflanked

By forces too unkind for words. Crows feast

Consumed from antiseptic distances, the markings
Made on basalt tablets and fired Herculean clay;
Hieroglyphics, or, simply, holy stone writings.

XIX

Because a liar's lips do not bleed from fibs

And truth's stallion starts late off the block
There is open season for a pig's ad-libs
In the song defining the flight of a dainty flock

A liar‘s lips do not mushroom in purple

From allergy to truth, they do not break
Out in rashes, are not inflamed, do not mottle
With lie-particles – aren‘t forked as mandrake;

127
Freckled are the travelled feet of falsehood
Grey the sunken eyes of practiced lies
Steady is the gaze of guilt when the mood
Is ripe for perfidy. The very skies

Are not broad enough for greed, the ocean

Is not deep enough for craven avarice
Only death will satisfy the greedy, only demotion
Satisfies the grasping reach of idle cowardice.

Thus the barbarian pendulum of meaning

Froze over at overkill, blood moon, pogrom
And Araba rose as a shout, became the rallying
Cry of a people misled by example. From

July through September hunting false foes

Through our Sahel and the waiting jaws
Of Lokoja. Ruptured memories, death-throes
Of plain citizens caught between hate‘s claws.

XX

Desert-dweller fable says that at man‘s creation

Twin clay clods were left over. Of the first
Was the hardy palm tree made, for nutrition,
And the other formed the camel, conqueror of thirst.

And they say, by their firesides at night

That the camel is a beast to treasure
For it knows one name more by camel-light
Above the ninety-nine men have the pleasure

128
Of knowing, among the names of God.
Also, that creature is a master of the art
Of protest-death. Meeting abuse with dignified quiet
And the death of a martyr, switching the heart

Off like a light bulb. So when they say

That the world is a desert and women
Are camels that aid the crossing, the men
Should pause or prepare to die along the way.

XXI

Importunate tellurian, what shall the desert yield you?

There are diamonds in Silet, platinum in the Hoggar
Silt and salt from Tit to Tibeghin, cobalt so blue
Prized Tanzanite blushes. There are palms at Adrar

Cartesian wells from Carthage to Cyrenaica

Oil like a glut in Hassi Messaoud, water
Worth the weight in champagne, mica
And potash, also, prime Moroccan leather?

Perpetual fables of love at first touch?

From the lady whose name is a quilt of blossoms
She with hair as a sheaf of musk? This much
Is known – the desert has a mania for stories and sums,

Tragedy and distracted words, red as a sea of herrings

Sent forth from the mouth of an elder
Disturbing the sleep of truth, the first stirrings
Of innocence budding into the stink river

129
Fouling the banks with funk. Yet the blind
May find their way following stench to source
Feeling along the bones of eviscerated mind
Floating with notes from a flute‘s slim force

Into the corner kept for age-worn stars

And age-worn galaxies, retiring with secrets
Entrusted to the vigilance of joyful friars
Whose fragrant youths vanished without regrets.

XXII

In Benghazi, skywriting with poets and dreamers

On a high of freedom, the aromatic scent
Of birthrights restored suffusing decks of steamers
Breasting the sea from a long past that went

Hostile with each sunrise, shrouding hope and breath

In a cloud of peril. Heaven was brass
After Tripoli‘s brief honeymoon, dissent spelt death
As big brother stamped his image on grass,

In the torturer‘s gaze, long as the history

Of false confessions which settled on the nurse
Rattling every nerve. He said ‗I‘ll make you sorry
For every wound you bound. I am the curse.‘

But true totems survive the desert as the holocaust,

Make cities of memories and their circumstance
Grow sinew. Cross their Rubicon counting the cost
To past and progeny, heirs to blessing and dance.

130
Sahara‘s suite of silence is an endless vault
Where time retreats from clocks and prying instruments
Whose shining chrome must bear the brown insult
Of rust before they understand – mere implements

Cannot begin to fathom timeless depth or height

Through which the earth itself has travelled
Whose memory hides within plain sight
To yield to meditative souls unravelled.

XXIII

By decree the arum lilies slept in the shadows

Of barely, taller shrubs. Man has moved nature
Around his voyaging planet and his tossed cosmos
And colours blend anew as his chameleon‘s aperture

So much is chance, so little art and science

The febrile planet cooks from here on out
With every second of man‘s industry her patience
Shrinks in a grimace that has not learnt to pout

And that meal, bland as thin porridge simmers

While scholars, measured as crickets, warn shrilly
Of death in the pot and rampant death for swimmers
Whose naked torsos drag through hyacinth and lily

Climbing through canals into ancient seas, spreading

Like error in a lazy class. Night‘s slumbering spell
Lingers so long it hurts, its Rubicon drowning
Every alligator at dusk, singing ‗it is well.‘

131
Said the desert, ‗Recall to me in the future
Anything I told you in the past or presently
Which proves untrue or in need of suture;
I try to avoid such.‘ This was said diffidently

With a cackling voice that was also sly

In the rising heat of another summer day
Stripping for Atlas whose shadow convulsively
Shrank with the sundial. Who can say

For certain how many trees have died

To make their bed and bier? The wind rocks
A barrack of woolen tents pitched and tied
For a nomad‘s stand against prehistoric rocs.

XXIV

Febrile the lips of February that fastened

Upon dark nipple of a Roma raincloud
Doomed to disappearance – both lovers chastened
By hovering wind, spoilsport in grey shroud...

The desert becomes itself in repetitions, of dunes

And dryness, endless winds in constant recitation
Of aural totems in danger of oblivion, potent runes
Present on the tongue like speech from a visitation

As failed synonyms of love harden on the tongue

And the alkaline taste of blood, forbidden, dissolves
In biotelemetry. Lugard, faux patrician, was wrong
Insurgent loyalties will rise and fight like wolves

132
XXV

One with angels in luminosity, Alexandria‘s Clement

Waged hard battles in spirit for inner life,
Gnostic grace by whispered prayer and lament
To rise superior to riches and worldly strife.

XXVI

Here is remembrance beyond reach of memory

Beyond calibration of callow geology, here the ages
Are splayed in a vista beyond reckoning of the hoary
Eye, the bald head, the bent, purblind adages

Of the tribes. Here is the long testament

Of ‗Fiat Lux’ the zeal of first matter
Resisting inhumation, perpetual in its comment
On the beginning when there was no water

Here the lost age of Aquarius, Mega-Chad

When monsoon and axis of earth agreed
To nurture life, a phase soon forgotten as fad
In the Aeolian age. The Sahara‘s creed

Was glory or death, placing demands on change

Hard change, giving the lie to simple evolution
Or fabled adaptation. Here was that strange
Threshold of Tao the desert crossed with conviction

133
To be more than land or wasteland, gateway
To splendour or purgatory, theme park or home.
Creation learns from a desert-crossing another way
To be planetary tenants, dwellers of all the dome.

Echoing Scipio Africanus who learnt to read beyond

Auguries of birds into the heart of things, feng shui
Of lighted stairways to heaven– the luminous pond
Bearing paradoxical fish, the reticent and showy.

XXVII

Who is the enemy? Who flares poison gas?

Who cuts down the trees without let?
Who drains the marsh for all it has?
Who trawls the seas with the killing net?

The same kind that studies the dinosaur

Learning nothing from lizards, building plants
That make a million mirrors in the hour
Learning nought from reflection or the ants.

Who is the enemy but the one with one

Mission? Gouging for gold and yellowcake
To wage the final war that never can be won
With force of arms or megatons? For the sake

Of rainmakers, keepers of runes, planters of peace

We shall find the answers, reclaim the soil
Soothe the earth of bruises, find surcease
For labouring Atlas and peasants from toil.

134
Night joshes with the wind, mutually wondering,
Measuring the span of the milky way
With playful fingers. The wind’s conquering
Vigour dozes, frayed in the heat of day

Their kabuki masque enthrals the witness moon

And the desert, bedewed, cold to touch, echoes
Lithe jests of the pair. Time’s ready cocoon
Breaks, yielding another dawn on infant toes.

XXVIII

Gas-lit lamps bejewelled the highway we travelled

Yenagoa to Alexandria. The whispering gas
Fed a million stands and more, they dazzled
With craft through mangrove and mountain pass

Lit like the very stars, over dune and rock

Over marshes and sand stretches, black
Horizons teeming with night gems and tussock
Reviving with the scent of freshwater reticulated back

From harvest-troughs of the distant mangrove

Where breathing roots reached out to balanites
In a fellowship of flora as pilgrims drove
Up to the cradle with green dreams, flights

Beyond fancy pilgrimages of the mind, linking histories

In a bold bond of nurtured aspirations
Coast to cultured coast, trees are trophies
Living markers of a people‘s longings, their ambitions.

135
XIX

The revolution was televised late, the aboriginal

Jasmine jazzfest began long ago and ended
On a chromatic note. Now the liminal
Song of shepherds and olive planters that tended

Olive groves echo in our drunken forests

Dizzy with birdsongs at dawn – this hymn
Giddy with harmony beggars belief as it crests
Above the reach of green mamba steam.

XXX

Dry, delicious desert myths, their loose irony

Aired like artifacts in the Cave of Swimmers
Once liquid legends, rebutting the wind‘s fury
In arguments winnable only by rare dreamers

Stripped of every clothing, boys bare and blind

Become roman à clef codes for future telling
Where, etched on walls, their aquaria find
Regaling boys with ancient tales of snorkeling.

This is that apiary, store of past pollinations,

Where Suez sings the song of mankind‘s flowering.
These are the flaxen azure fields where nations
Lit themselves their candles for empowering

136
Minds with seeds of light, the perfume
Of knowledge, oiled wafers of tested science.
Pyramids started the discourse they resume
Here in the Sudan, before genocide‘s belligerence.

Two travellers rest in the shadow of one game clock

Noisier than the wind. Time passed simultaneously
As they traded stories of courage and of pluck
The wind had quietened to listen inconspicuously

To their travelling tales – seeking after solace

Riches or simple joys. The wind envied man
Of his will-to-joy and of his very race –
Not strong but yet they manage what they can.

XXXI

Twittering deep Sheng, early birds trace pollen

In migrating wind from Darfur‘s grain fields
Where safety flees from food amidst fallen
Heroes tinkering with what the harvest yields –

For so long, Darfur‘s Lazarus brood lay dead

And their adversaries, armed with furnished hate
Rode with the janjaweed and shed
The blood of infants, calling murder fate

Until vast sand plains the enemies sought

For loot freed itself from certain doom
Staunching the bleeding from battles hard-fought
By squinting generals from Juba to Khartoum.

137
Their soirees mock the weak of all Sudan
Whose Nile remains farmer and fisherman‘s source
Of sustenance. A crude obsession, an obstinate plan
Wrecks what remains of Abyei, taken by force

From guardian spirits, keepers of the land

Ancient ones who hide from Kalashnikovs, wary
Of death‘s urgent dialogues painting the sand
A deep crimson, littered with remains of quarry.

Now the common song of birds is broken

Their harmony shattered by thugs of state
Who know no loyalty to country, whose token
Gratitude is grown on greed, whose fate

Is infamy in the annals of future seed

She heals but in staggered stages, her grace
Returns with daylight and a fresh creed
Of triumph for a grander, novel phase.

XXXII

War is won in battles won, in blood

Shed. Of one‘s own and of the enemy‘s—
In speed and wit deployed, in more blood
Of the adversary‘s, in field-spun alchemies

Of hardy radishes, guts, mortar fire, snake meat.

War is won with scorpion nimbleness, horse spur,
The spirit that sings in the face of defeat
Without qualms; that fights, that won‘t demur.

138
Thus braced against reflex of panzer contradiction
Patton‘s 3rd army took to pagan sands
Sworn to the last stone in resolution
To wrest the trophy from German hands.

Many would die, beast and men both

Their flesh and bones nourish the earth,
The soil that by itself swore the oath
Of allegiance to Africa, the human hearth.

Heedless of when the flag fell, a straggler soldier

Threadbare as his khaki scans the air for signs,
Too long has he known war’s mean bombardier
Surface from the bluest skies. With noiseless lines

He traces his retreat to brown bunkers of earth

Longs for home and mommy, for Halcyon
Wherever it may be found. Why is mirth
So far away? Why are the dead so common?

XXXIII

Half-full, the desert‘s hourglass, half empty

Running a linear race where fear is found
In the absence of water. The haughty
Logic of weathermen terrifies, cloud bound.

It rained hippos and ivory once, rivers

Raged here, obese, overflowing mud banks
Flooding the plains with reasons for beavers
To build. It rained mangoes and tanks

139
Liquid artillery sculpted the stone valleys hollow
Ripe weather burst here once, though distant,
That era teemed with crocodiles. We follow
History in pursuit of water, the one constant

For keeping life rafts afloat. The rains here

Floated armadas beyond the vanishing point
Of Jurassic eyes, into the Levant hemisphere
And beyond, as the planet fractured out of joint.

There is a leviathan in every goose that lays

A golden egg, a warlock that waits upon the coven
Of the desert to throw tantrums, paint days
In the colour of dust, mar dreams marked proven

For hatching. There is a badger in every snail

A fish for every tackle, stirrup for every horse
Pawing the sand in the Maghreb. Chain mail
For every lost knight galloping from bad to worse.

XXXIV

Of the first Nuba house ice-ages on, a ruse

Arose and made a home on the mantelpiece
It spoke of whiteness so complete and diffuse
That it took the shape of the present peace.

Lay between the silence and first speech

Between earth and luminous glow
Preternatural, omnipresent and rich –
With words unspoken, lights trimmed low.

140
XXXV

Wondrous words of Mr. Murray nose in

With the breaking dawn – as a pack of dogs
After a rich night of wild boar hunting.
Warm currents from the coast clogs

Vision on this strip off Nouadhibu and soon

The poem he titled Blood came fully
Back, all twelve stanzas, like a boon
Of integers, my mind was pulley;

Testing the weight of each arrivant

Into the morning, on that bare beach
Pristine, clear, free of crude irritant
Substantial in their migratory reach.

We dream, someday, that skyscrapers

Would sprout in the arid void we see today
That sooner or later, tailors and drapers
Would make air-conditioned malls arrive and stay.

It would be science, it would be art

It would be plants resistant to drought
It would be passion in the human heart
It would be high finance and clout

But that day will come and humankind

Will claim this Sahara again as home
Malthus would blush because his mind
He always chided not to roam.

141
XXXVI

Still varied, the manifold vistas of the long dream

Hibernating in the sands, of conscious verdure
The lush thousands, green acres, the finned stream
Brimming with life beyond the wind‘s censure

True totems survive the desert like the holocaust

Make cities of memories and their circumstance
Grow sinew. Cross their Rubicon counting the cost
To past and progeny, heirs to benediction and dance.

XXXVII

The madness of the lean soldier began

On this wise: exhausted through and thirsty
He dreamt within a night of a toboggan
Filled with cold parrots, snow white and frosty

Ramming into his skull. He awoke into quiet

As a man in the aftermath of a crash
Occurring deep in space. Suddenly his diet
Of nothing told, lacking water to drink or wash…

A is for Amharic, for Arabic. A pluralis fractus

And angel dust. It used to stand for apples
For aeroplanes, asylums, aquaria, even here
With whole whales and a couple of sharks.

142
B is for the Bomb, obviously. Buddha bookends
Broads, natty blings and other nifties. B
Is for bunkers, for ballads of the buskers
Who surprise us with themes from Bombay.

C is for Celeritas and for caution, hundred

Carat Sahara diamonds, conscionable
Deals between China and the continent.
C is for Cool and its rebirth in Chopin.

D is for doubt, doldrums. Who could imagine

That moments of dullness occur here too?
D is for the dubious, 419 for the most part,
And dithering resolve to do the needful.

E is for emphasis. For electric emphysema.

Everything that rises and evaporates, for
Electronic money. E is for that eternity
Of endless waiting in the African past.

F is for Faraday’s fantastic flowers, FCUK too.

Fact is, f is for fantasy, five thousand years
Of fluent literature in the friendly languages,
And frostbites of the famous Jack London.

G, necessarily is for God. Nietzsche was wrong.

That Guy never died, wouldn’t, couldn’t die.
The other G is for Godfather, the Grand Goon
And not the likeable Hollywood kind.

143
H is for hell, apparently. Hoplomachi afterlife.
Go away. Maroko, Ajegunle, Mogadishu
Places that won’t allow the world to forget.
Yet earth was always meant for paradise.

I is for Irruption, that fellow with a boner

Or a gun in his trousers all the time.
Interestingly, I is also for instruments
Which is saying much for Homo sapiens.

J is for justice. No, not the one decked out

In that sad cloak, the real substance. J
Is for juice and jouissance, twin turbos
In the jet plane we fly through life.

K is for the Kalahari, that other frontier.

For Kush and the infinite riches in it,
For Kairos and the monumental Kasbah
Between Kunlun and Kailas mountains.

L is for love on the lees of the Atlas,

Languorous sunsets in La Skhirra, the
Left-leaning Logone. L is for Laperrine
Of France, gourmand and ascetic general.

M is for Ms and MSS. M is for mountains,

So many lovely mountains from the Maghreb
To Matmata. Making awesome montages
With mirages over the Mediterranean.

144
Need we say N is for Naija? Land of real
Ninjas. Bad niggas. N is for nomads
And the numberless exiles from Africa
Who have learnt numbness from the cold.

O is for oil. The catastrophic blessing.

For opal, for the oasis. O is for odes
Growing like dates across Ouargla.
O is for Onan on the harsh oilfields.

P is for pricks who pee in pools, pests

Who preside on the republic. But P
Is for people honestly at work, and P
Is palaver as Fela Kuti sang. P is Plenty.

Q is for polyphonic luxury of the Q7,

Quantum of solace in the Sahara heat.
Q is for the queen, God save her soul.
And Q, over here, is for the Quran.

R is for Rabelais, of course, who else?

Rimbaud maybe, before his gun-running
Days. R is for rain charm, roulette,
Translated from Russian with the rest.

S is for Solomon Island blondes, spotted

Skunks doing handstands. S is for synesthetic
Sex in the tantric swamp of dollars.
And S is for the susurrus of the satellites.

145
T is for truth serum tested on terrorists.
Ha ha, believe it, it’s true, they’ve got it.
T is for Tunisian troglodytes, tough ducks,
Terrible as boys out on the town.

U is for UFOs, unclad feminine orbs

Of Helen on which Menelaus repented.
U is for U-Boats, killers of their time.
U is for unity as of the rich rainbow.

V is for venationes, who would have thought?

V is for vicarious joy in the victory
Of the gladiator. V is for the virgin
Vestal and otherwise, also the virago.

W is for water, good old water, H20

W is for Wandering Oases so wanton.
And W is for the waste all around,
The wonderful made worse with wear.

X is for, you guessed it already, the unknown.

X is for the hourglass you can’t upturn,
Trickling time into the abyss of memory.
It is the cat Amalinze, quicker than Turks

At wrestling you. X is the future of men

And women when you think of it. It stands
For years left in the sun, the quantity
Of hydrogen in that fiery flaring ball.

146
Y is for years and years and years.
Y is youth and Y is yeast. Y is yes
And sometimes no, Y is pure gold
Made prolific in the ancient Yetti Plains.

Z is for zebras still, all three kinds.

Their rugged resistance to taming.
Z is for Zulu, for the Zoua, marabouts
And Z is for the wealth in Zarzaitine.

XXXVIII

Contemplation‘s maiden flight from chrysalis,

Meaning‘s cargo delivered in brown nouns from womb
Of seriffed winds surfing a roped chalice
Burnished to the tone of the honeycomb,

This is El-Shuaib, receiving enchanted feet

In Egyptian welcome after Tahrir Square, there tales
Of one resort vie with others as they greet
Over coffee and cake, one tourist regales

Another with pickled fantasy. There is strong conception

Of the future in thespian Shuaib, also present hope
For dance across the quadrants, drawing attention
To forgotten rhythms of a different rope-a-dope

In the way that grey hair alone can yarn

Having resigned from other futile yearnings
Under one tree that owned itself, Quran
Spiced narratives recounted antipodean warnings

147
About what matters in order to survive. It’s true
That age can place an emphasis on wisdom
Deemed inconvenient in youth, and, being young, you
Place your emphasis on the exceptional kingdom

148
 Mediterranean Interludes

Now embrace the wisdom in silence the silence in wisdom as an

anorexic sun aids the crossing of time across constellations from the
old habitation of Taurus time‘s slow waltz into the tropic of cancer
where foxes dwell with their worked answers for oil sold in barrels
bought along with lubricated sovereignty but a man seldom strays
from where his corn is roasting unless of course the fetters ambush the
diadem where sandstone legend preserve moieties paramount in
everything more august than the month more mysterious here than
the mention of Moscow one now with travellers consulting sun and
compass for correction shower of lights tilt of testament meteor
rapture above crystal salt flats torrent of tumescent balls celestial
record in clay one of a posse but one gun wearing his tribal marks in
the crossing of the sea my great-grandfather‘s son alien refulgence the
Sahara saw it all captured it all marks it all in the ash of saurian
potentates we can transplant the Karoo tend the bleached sand into
halophyte heaven thrive on flood green moss of ejaloniblues and
company in the chess haunts on Herbert Macaulay or the lungu at Ilesa
under African skies alive with pieces of Mars falling all over the Sahara
and the blueing legend of the Mediterranean alive with high-density
low-iron nutrient-rich load of the old soil god marooned on the red
planet for the next couple of a billion years the sisters cool Karamazov
too playing geologists here for kicks on largesse plucked from
afterglow of cold war treaties listening to Isaac Hayes at the Sahara
Tahoe live as the desert clicked its heels with déjà vu day winds
revisited in the ultraviolet rays of hope for a rhizomatic world order
perfected in Deleuze, Guattari and Glissant cool guys anyhow their
purple rain orchestra chutzpah mellowing in the light Oka Obono
kindles on the road of aspiration and the chorus dirges of the fateful
prophecy from the village of dark Kremnus Kremnus Kremnus

149
 III
REMNANT MUSIC

‗I have tried hard to write, but let this do;

let gratitude redeem what lies undone.‘
— Derek Walcott

150
*
For Cheikh Anta Diop
Bull of our buffaloes, your hooves
Took you through terrains,
Set you on high, stood you tall in valleys.
Eagle of the continent, your wings

Spanned the length of the Nile,

So you may soar among the stars.
Lion of Serengeti and Senegal,
Mane refulgent with Egypt,

Lord of Mastodons, King of Mountain Cats.

O man among men, revelation and root,
Our High Priest of knowledge,
Sun that‘ll never set.

Spendthrift I turn the lane into the babble

Of a brook ripe with scent of cooling
Stones and earth. The ozone
Taste of everything right before it rains.

With your poems in my nose

A field of pumpkins rich and red
A valley full of grapes and bees.
Sea-kissed grapes, sun-ripened, borne on vines

151
And roots that reach deep
Into the Palaeozoic heart of Africa.
Your poems are meadows of my memories
And rain is all at one with sun

In a rainbow where light travels light

Singing through the reds and indigo.
Your poems defy definition like tones
Of ambergris and musk locked in tender tango

While the wind dances like a yakuza girl,

Swirling upon its toes with its hair like djinns
Resuming perennial conspiracies of wind and sun,
Brainchildren of the Blue Nile and its delta.

Quicksand riddles, embellished survivor tales –

They thrive in our land of air accidents
Where clear skies, friendly to foreign planes
Reject the indigent outright. Elephants

Invaded our skies once, morphing into birds

Flightless as the dodo and just as dead.
Our bird strikes the jungle of changeling rafts
Reddening liquid runways begging for alms,

Avenging refusals with copious harvests,

Our tenderest. In this land, fact refuses
Bribery continually within the skies
Rendering returns of human remains.

152
Pray not to fly into the famished jaws
Of our travails. To escape the maws
Of the ravenous skies, pray to board
That craft alone that engineers favoured.

Choose the mule above the donkey

In this desert, they survive quicksand,
Always do. Choose with eyes wide
Open, with ears to the humble ground.

*
Gasping up the Koussi of thought
Along a tall thin trail
No fennec fox could have made,
Mrs Einstein chanced upon a curious find:

Clearly Cro-Magnon, with a quiet eye.

'And what are you?' she asked.
He understood she meant no disrespect
After a thoughtful while

(Which taxed the two of them

In that rare atmosphere)
'I'm a poet' he said, a wry
Smile spreading on his blizzard

Bitten face. 'A mind athlete if you like.

I'm a one, a two, a threefold being.
Like light.' Which sent her physics hurtling down
Toward Tibesti’s foot to be smashed into a million

153
Bloody pieces. Wasn't light at most a mere duality
Of wave and particle, particle and wave?
He seemed to read her mind and smiled.
'It is hardly ever what you think.'

He said. And picked his way ahead of her

Along the tall thin trail
Mr Einstein took to the tip of Tibesti
Nodding every step he took.

Fresh grass was food enough for donkey

Tied to mill, describing mindless circles
In a task that man invented. Food was key
In keeping revolt at bay, the mill‘s cycles

Running for two thousand years. Imagine

What joy it must have been to beasts
Freed at last to graze abroad by machine
That threshes corn from husks for feasts.

Let this conniption cure

Ailing kidneys of my country,
Let my land‘s liver endure
The hard knuckles of her gentry.

154
Let the mute keening
In the lungs of patriots
Survive the length of this evening
Of hope fading in clay chariots –

And let these millions rise

To rid the land of pestilence
Everywhere present in the eyes
Of bastards here and across the fence.

*
For Eman al-Obeidy

She crossed the street for groceries, a daughter of Benghazi

Child of one Libya. She boarded the cab out of Tripoli
Still a child of one Libya. And when they stopped her, the Nazi
Militia in green, her face was bold, and, yes, holy.

Rain does not evade the path of the runnel

Frogs do not decline the call of the stream
The sponge will not refuse the voice of the river
Salt will ever heed the glad eyes of the sea.

The needle does not decline a tryst with cloth

The road does not complain at the tread of feet
When young love meets the moon it blossoms
When eyes meet with beauty the face blooms

So let those who love this land be safe

Let those who hate this land be swallowed
And when the children lift their voices
Let all of those who hear be glad

155
Let all of those who heed rejoice.
Glory does not kill the morning
Splendour does not slay sunsets
Love for a child does not kill the mother

The praise of fathers does not kill their sons

When a bride kneels before her groom she's blessed
Whenever a daughter is born
We know we shall not die

Whenever a son is given there is joy

Let all the daughters of this land be fruitful
Let all the sons of this land increase
And if from east or west there should be anger

If from north or south there should be rage

Let all the rage and anger dissipate
Like smoke in the breeze
Like a dog’s dream when it comes awake.

What words we have spoken let them cleave

What hearts belong to us let them not grieve
Let our words find us prepared
Let all our dreams find us prepared

Our faith, our hope, our love

Let them make us ready for the end.
And our land, our country, our earth
Let them find us ready at our end.

156
*

Crosswinds caress hid brows, jasmine flowers of the Tamazgha

Softly rending tough fingers, veiled enclaves of repressed hopes
Stirring song from drought-stricken streets, broaching laughter
On Berber lips, dreams of laurel leaves, inebriate isotopes

Preserved in vats of fat and rose petals, hermetic as tradition.

Memory flourishes here, evergreen, glorying against obsolescence
The enfleurage mystique garnered in oil to furnish a generation
As yet distant with substance beyond disputation and presence.

And now appears the absent hero, resplendent,

Present beyond apparition, soaring in the skies
Eagle intent on nothing but air, yet as confident
As it is conscious of itself, free from land-ties

Rude heat smothers the morning on its diligent round

This heat medieval, generous with delirium manifests
With the desert sun. Wavering shadows without sound
Sway in the sweltering silence where nothing rests.

Horned vipers in the sand, camouflaged, proof

To the divinity of humour even when it‘s dark
And dry. Far away from oasis and shadoof
Eternal assassins, mousing in their theme park.

And desert rats, captive to deaf musicians

Keep the race of serpents in the race, survival
Chasing the tail of death. They too are Tunisians
They have always been, the desert pair, coeval

157
With vanished ghosts of leopards, addax, wild goats
Foxes, cheetahs, hard scavengers and survivors
Species yesterday made extinct, living in notes
Of old geologists— they too are casualties of wars

Waged with that intensity nowhere else shown

To man or beast on this planet. No beast‘s cry
Suffices, no human hand has written down
Such scale of tragedy as spans landscapes so dry

Where camels of an age that trod alabaster trails

Of desert paths knew every oasis by scent –
Still amble with burdens weighted, their tails,
Ill-mannered as flies, following every bent.

Lost in the labyrinth of lost causes, canine gods

Press through to Notir. Compasses are no good
Time‘s weevils have made camp in those gourds.
Still, seeking to find and be found, the mood

Amongst the shivering papyri made of nostalgia

For crocodile hunt, the poetry of every dawn
Resurrects in the Dog Star‘s farewell, the eye‘s apologia
The quiet that came before Thoth‘s final yawn,

Before stones groaning like marooned whales

Splitting with the sun, withering with harsh weather.
Their endurance is daunting, everything pales
In their grim lexicon of heat. A feather

158
Of snow, rare as Haley‘s comet with its tail
Of ice descends upon the stony desert
Melting like a dream of noctambulist hail
In dress rehearsal of great ephemeral art.

A star rasps from the edge of desert night

Its distant music survives the prattle of dawn
And then is swallowed by the morning light
To sing again of kings and queens and pawns

There is a thought on the tip of the desert’s tongue

It turns trace, to phantom of a long pipeline
Running from Bonny Island to far Hong Kong
Drowning every mile with wealth and wine.

Lion of the Tamazgha, led by the noose

Defiant in the face of storm clouds darkening
The horizon; he let lesser beings choose
The clamorous hour of his death by hanging.

Offering the peace of the brave, De Gaulle

Courted a nation intransigent, it was that season
Of crimson tumuli in the desert, the darkest pall
Descended on the Maghreb like very treason.

The colours of freedom are the same colours

As those of the newly born, blood precedes
The narrative and pangs of pain, it pours
With the crowning, it multiplies, it recedes

159
For a spell before the joy is born.
Fragile baby joy— arriving in a slender frame
It brooks no quarrels or it is soon torn
And then? A return to origins of the same.

Through rockfalls and rapids, brown silt

Fed the delta‘s children like a patient nanny
As a river empties, pouring itself into the hilt
Of a waiting scabbard, a long journey

Through Africa‘s deep heart ends, the sea

Itself tastes freshness, stirs with gladness
As it drinks. There is always light to see
Their commingling, and sound in the darkness.

Mamelukes and their aqueducts, quenching thirst

In the city of Cairo, they also dreamt of travel
In hot air craft, they dreamt of surfing
On carbon fibre wings. It is true

They dreamt ahead of time, made plans

For another age, where the necropolis
Does not consume genius. The Turks
Are dreaming today, with Nubian Copts

Assured of nothing but dreaming in the land

Of Isis. They do not desist from pursuit
Of wholeness, of romantic completion,
The making perfect of that benign impulse

160
Lulling men to sleep in the torpor of Luxor
They wage jihad on the angel of forgetfulness
Epimetheus, the lord of oblivion. Thus
The days find redress, the hours mending.

Donkeys follow the trails of old bazaars

At the owner‘s urgings and bear human
Drivers to groves of young date trees
Where thirst faces off with resistance.

Tetouan is a lush garden of spices

Through which we pass on our way
To Fez and on to the mystery of Marrakesh
Wearing burnous of tempered sunrise.

Taking refuge in the coherent impulse

Of the long march, in a desert‘s rhythm
Its small cathedral of the march. One
Of the company practises his Kanuri.

*
A shimmering, suspended city appeared at noon
Capturing the grandeur of Carthage‘s architecture
As it floated out of reach that day in June.
The vision vanished but its revenant structure

Anchored itself to the meditating monk‘s mind

Such cities as air and sun can raise
Out of nothing mow doubt of a heavenly kind
Permanent as promised pleasure of praise

161
Of God. It was in Carthage that the tome
Found amanuensis, in the cobbled city heart
Tempered to seeing things far away from home
Inversely ploughed belief in some celestial art.

*
‗Watch violence through the telescope of years…‘
- Jean Arasanayagam

Through dry, craggy landscapes the witness journeyed

Far from cities awash with neon and electric lights
To a cave cyclopean in search of ancient art. His only need
Was chemical light, sufficient to see the engraved sights,

Adequate to redeem the child intent on revenge

The waif of anarchy oblivious of the need
To dig two graves if one must avenge
Failures, sunset clauses, betrayals that bleed

Into the conscience of a waning cosmos –

We remind the child of those ancestors
Stalwart in defence of the city of Jos
Whose last words in the claws of raptors

Echoed a truth from the foundation of earth

That the world never ever ends. It evolves
Like proscenium stage through abundance or dearth
Memory and willed amnesia, sheep and wolves

162
Who exchange clothing in the wordy aftermath
Of civil encounters. The world is that stubborn
That cavalier— the strangeness of its path
Bewildering here in Algadez as in the Sorbonne

Only brokenhearted guitars, shattered drums

Know loneliness like the one this desert feels
After tropical storms; its sonorant groan strums
Into the void without end, where life reels.

*
Leila, my love comes with constancy
As stripes on a thousand generations
Of zebras. It comes with the charm
Of fireflies flung out on the fields

Of Sudan and Serengeti plains

My love, it comes with cognac
Chocolate, palm wine and burukutu:
Plantain, rice like revelation, sautéed

Liver sauce and prime Ethiopian coffee

It is a boat full of flowers on the Zambezi.
My love is the music of the song
Of Solomon reprised with a palmist‘s

Sorcery on my great-grandfather‘s drum

It is the axis on which the earth reclines
The silhouette of syllables from another age
Ah, my love it comes with bells

163
And whistles, scented baths
The gentlest scrub of the gentlest
Sponge, breakfasts in bed and grapes
Shallots, pawpaw and skimmed milk…

This is to say that I too have moved on

And away from our troubled terminus
With my burden of illicit loves
To a field high up the last plateau

From which your little feet fled.

Not ugliness was my crime, you said
When last we spoke, not failure
But sheer obesity, from feeding on your image.

So have I sown your observation

Near my heart, it has grown into a tree
Such as storms respect. Your observation
Has grown roots, finding nourishment

From the image of you I fed on. Release

Me, please and let me go, our tie
Was severed but still remains, a sword’s
Width is all that separated us.

Much is told in blood, this much we know,

Where camps lie rigid as corpses of peace
And the earth is silent from mortar blow
Rendered numb and sundered piece by piece.

164
Of its own, the desert sings, the booming voice
Replete with history, laden with wind-age
As if a full Touareg choir made of boys
Should metamorphose to men on its red stage.

Hoarded like treasured heirloom, Mari Djata‘s spears

Kept for four centuries more, then time, inexorable
Wreaked vengeance on wood and steel, time spares
Matter in half-lives only, decay adds to its stable.

They say that a lifetime passes in a liquid moment

Before the eyes of a drowning man— Sundiata‘s
Mortal moment was a prophecy brooking no comment
From him or anyone. A child called Sankara

Would be born a wee distance from the river

His charm and grace would stand him out
Infinite as the horizon, storied as the night
Sundiata slept and dreamt of his raging empire

Shivering with rebuttals in the harmattan‘s dire

Clutch. His blanket, lone companion, wound tight
Around that strained torso, he imagined a pyre
For his enemies so real that he shrank in fright

Upon his curled toes. Nature tries the king

Among kings, tossing cold by the ton at his fire
The sap babbles in his veins, there is a sting
In the rising impulse of the day, fuelling ire

165
Lacking the acumen of a swimmer, he faced
Himself mirrored in the pool of Mali‘s lake
Where death by drowning lurked. His heart raced
To embrace his image as the river turned opaque.

Doubly dim, this lad wielded the mace

To traduce youth and truth in the hallowed house
He hunkers down to a mess of putrid pottage
Befriends the locksmiths of another clime

When asked for a word to save his country,

He parrots lines from fallen angels still
His jaw, mastiff-like, latches unto lies
Like dog to bone. He dines at the vomitorium

Drinks his health in halls bereft of health

His hansard season fades into the Sahara
Where he writes his name in windblown sand
And when his children ask him for account

His silence is all he‘s fit to show

His infamy is on the lips of infants now
His shadow the silhouette exorcists abjure
So none may walk so confidently astray

Or presume on sleep of poets and public songs.

For its own, the desert keeps silence, empires
Of sand, endless time. To share, it offers fragments,
Slices, a vast void, aspects of its own necropolis.

166
*

What desert grows the deciduous and conifers?

The Sahara. What desert rears apocryphal prawns?
The Sahara. Sunrise is the loom of her junipers,
Sandstorms the quilt of her primordial lawns.

So they poisoned the ochre of my desert‘s intestines

With radioactive pills, they mobbed the microbes
In their century-long sleep. Vehemence is mantra
In the season of mankind‘s war on mother earth.

Seventeen thousand lay dead, Tirailleurs Senegalais

And a hundred thousand more did fight for France
Their sacrifice called forth rewards of irony
Still their children sing of glorious empire.

Homage to him whose meanings enlarge with time

Homage to him whose words outlive guns, whose tempered
Mind, true as pure steel, keeps through the ages, sublime
Homage to the Samurai, still supple, though weathered—

Who keeps bullion words in store, mint for the ones

Who come after. Homage, I say, to his scabbard
Housing tensile words, measured and rare, once
Upon a time at Nsukka, once upon a time at Bard

167
Once upon a time at nestling Brown, but always
In our hearts. Homage to the nimble craft
That issues from his pen, through endless days
Sailing secure, a writer fore and aft.

Homage to the teller of perfect tartan tales

Deep dyed in wit from harmattan and rain locales.
Hear it in the heart‘s deep core, one panegyric
For him who wrote the monuments with alphabets of magic

The Ténéré yawns and a dreamy dusk descends

With a confraternity of bats, war wags a finger
From the North, spitting field-gun flames, rends
Another mile of country in its path. A trigger

Threatens autarky in the hearts of young dreamers

Wasting breath in the nostrils of visions, killing
Nations in their Rasta resurrections. Hope shivers
At the sight of so much death amid shelling.

Hobbyhorses, boneshakers, ordinaries. No use

In the wide desert. What matters is music,
Rhythm, the force that drives the fuse.
Wingspan, in this age as in the Jurassic.

168
*

Chambered in fantasia, Tutankhamen‘s sarcophagus,

Last seen by morticians, gathers thankful dust.
Flecks of snow in that winter of his loss
Melted with a promise to Egypt first

Then to the world, asked up to heaven young

Cringing there in his coffin of wood and gold.
His historians will read lyrics of the last song
Offered at his entombment in the mortal cold.

Humbaba returns, guard of the faithful,

Nature‘s steed, pupil in the school of illusions
To the lair of the Nigersaurus, according to
Old Willie, sharper than a thankless tooth.

But cool as cornrow braids, Bassikounou‘s girls

Walk to work in the early morning sun
Their fractal smiles potent as hugs
Their swaying hips like pivots of motion.

A word-turned-raptor cannibalizes the response

To joyous daydream. This is the Sudan, the
Rent curtain of the Sahara, intent on truth
Teeming with the feet of countless refugees.

169
*

The long line of bards of this land

Fear nothing except perdition
They have survived war and privation
And so fear nothing of the planned

Retrenchment, retribution for their verse

That told the emperor of his nakedness.
This yogi desert between exultant pilates
Does its puja to wind and ageless sun.

Algerian weather improvises with a brief surprise

Of snow‘s calligraphy, brightening the gray horizon
As it shakes hands with the Mediterranean, thrice
In one decade. The legacy of an ice age rising

Into hard-won Ottoman void. Its mettle slipped

In the end, back into the unity of desert,
Silent dunes, overcome with isolation, dipped
And rose with travelling jetliner phantom.

Thronged once, with feet pledged in allegiance to power

This trail from Mali to Mecca merits another
Mention in the wilderness. The muezzin in his tower
Calls the muster once again, to pray, together,

170
Before the caravans depart. This place punishes stragglers
Drunks, loners and madmen. It punishes drifters
With thirst and hunger and a painful death. Drivers
Setting out pray for strength and against shape-shifters.

The cool genius of dawn also wakes in the voice

Of the muezzin. The voice is a vein in the neck
Of the rising ship. They made their choice
To join other faithful worshipers on the deck.

Seen as in hypnosis, the antlers of a mirage

Piercing rutilant expanses below high Assekrem
Makes the Hoggar home to midday sun-rage
And vanishing lakes like vagabonds of the realm.

The afternoons, monocled Cyclopes, burning

The brain with their lucid stare from whom retreat
Spells sapience, away from the course recurring
Constant as a curse on a sultry, skipping beat.

Heliopolis merchants too, silent and deadly as

Assassins. My bones remember their wily ways
In the lament for firstborn sons, bitter as hyssop
Erupting in the night of a Pharaoh‘s making.

171
*

Among the angels, the question hardly ever surfaces

As it seems to do with humans: how many
Angels can a tornado transport? How many braces
Suffice to hold their teeth in place, if any?

They walk the Sahara weeping at the loss

Awaiting desperate lives seeking to cross
From purgatory to heaven on lathered moss
Pending throw of coin in pitch and toss.

Stray cotton tree seed floats by like prayer

Aching for fallow soil, the parched throat aches
For rainy songs, with the fluent dialect of desert
Tortoise, a song stubborn as the ancient lure

Of sympathetic magic broods. It is now October

In my mind, there is the cry of birth,
Of revolution echoing on the parched plains
And there is promise of perfection

This time, and of a shade of permanence.

It is October in my mind, the wind drives
Faster than Mario Andretti, almost as fast
As lightning, and the air is keen with brio

172
With expectation as of the seagull sighting
The sea on its planes of migration. Purity
Tempts, here on the vast stretches, the bait
Is exhilaration as of those that run the marathon.

*
Ode of the four Foutas
I sing of Hercules the mouse of Mancina
In his Fouta delta of the Niger
Fringed by brittle sea of hominid bones
Spawned in ages lost to dark history.

I sing of Amina the eagle of Djallon

On her Fouta nestled up the high grounds
Of Guinea, witness to rapture, to horror
Meant by mankind for others of the kind.

I sing of Zunti the monkey of Tooro

On his Fouta shared between two banks
Of the River Senagal. May he escape
Traps set for lesser beasts by hunting man.

I sing of Bintu the boa of Bunndou.

On her Fouta between the closing borders
Of Mali and Senegal ushering in refugees
From the clash of amulets and triggers.

*
Sewn by the sky into the skin of a seagull
Skirting the Atlantic, the Spanish Sahara
Streaming below the coastline‘s skull
As prominent from the air as open Foggara

173
Shadows from dreams like chaff away from seed
To mulch future multitudes for seed harvest
In deserts now allergic to life. Earth will feed
Her children from leanness to verdant rest.

‗Sekunjalo‘ intoned the brown shepherd to hippopotamus

And thus began the great drive to the southern veldts
‗Sekunjalo Mzansi‘ said the occult voice, and rhinoceros
Led the greatest herd off all time into the rain belts.

Bandits among the Berber seized a straggler car

Deep in the heart of the Ténéré, the named ransom
For lone archaeologist was guns and bullets from afar
And the terms delivered by a lady buxom

Admitted no errors. The team asked proof of life

To which a voice on telephone much strained
By torture spoke: Colleagues, there is a hunting knife
Threatening my throat, my wrists are sprained

Provide, provide or prepare to bury me or worse,

Seek me through the many years you’re going to live
Counting the costs in sad arrears…the slap‘s force
Was heard a thousand miles away by all the five.

174
*

She could tell by his breathing, listening close

How their worlds evolved into this flourish
As he could guess from the brilliance of her fingers
Twirling the bloom within their favourite flower

How insomnia weaves fortune from battlefield

To bridge them to a bed of tropic hardwood
In quest of encounters that last the span
Between sightings of soldier and the beloved.

Sometimes the storms are a mighty rock concert

Piezoelectric buzz, wailing falsettos and thunder.
A party lit by big huge electric charge, from time
To time above riotous clouds and under.

Mapping precisely that amatory mood

Of the raging river under two sets of skin
Caught off guard in mimicry of nature,
In art that only is once upon a time.

Two metronomes gone raving mad

Starkers beyond the discipline of stark
Dontsaythosewordsdontsaythosewordsatall
Theyresayingyestheyllyessandyesssandyessss.

175
*

Chalk pits scattered as mushrooms revolt

Against the vast, subsuming desert red
They roll off the tongue and moult
To merge with salt pits and wed

Into alkaline matrimony of marshes

Where the chemistry of trade squares off
Against the call of beauty. Soap ashes,
Blended unguents, for rashes and cough.

Like a fisherman caught out on the high tide

Pitying not himself but rowing, his palms are
His relatives urging him on to land, his will
Is wrapped in effort to row to land or die.

This creature‘s almanac throbs with nostalgia

Like a whale throwing up spray fountains
Filled with joys and frustrations in his dreams
Pumped straight from mammal lungs of sea.

Tauris trades in markets of symbolic goods,

Its bourse is full of emblematic chattel
Stored in bits of Mars flung far to Earth
Where they telephone Mr. Craig Raine.

176
*
There is subtle warning in the nagging winds
It is a voice familiar to the desert child,
Seek ye refuge when it may be found
Before the days of silence finally arrive.

Niger is a marvel of simplicity, to her

Is peace and contradiction, sparseness
And plenty. Her suzerains, of late, have
Been electrodes planted in the pulp

Of the people‘s pre-molars, jolting

With virulent energy. Thus the omens
Whispering in the evening breeze
Where light is yet to break in the Sahel.

You were the first I knew, genuinely,

Who came complete. With writer‘s cramp
And block. Now I no more believe the recent lie,
That Nippon nurtures nothing but tempered steel.

I have known miracles here in Bougie

Beyond the bluster of bullet trains
You made a table out in the starlight
And made perfect napkins of our bandanas –

And ate, and drank, and told Sapporo tales

Out in the shadows of the Atlas mountains
Erasing the legend of the phantom chip
On shoulders raised within the prefectures

177
You were the first I knew who told Japan
Through poetry written for the world,
Across boundaries resistant to translation
Because you came complete with black magic.
Harada Katsuko’s.
*

Ascribe the sighting of a solitary horseman to substance

He bears news, vends happenings from across horizons
And even here, wayfarers stop at his instance
For morsels that feed the human heart beyond frissons.

The masses wake to hunger – shy breaths away

From plenty’s kitchen. They wake to want
A mere touch away from opulence’s sway
And history’s horde draws near to plant.

Sand-surfers, they dream of such slopes

Inclines sheer with the tangerine of sunrise
Fine as flakes and taut with wind-ropes;
Better than pharmaceuticals, better than the lies.

Watching the quela prey upon the ripening fields

Mari Djata, Sundiata Keita, made a solemn vow
To reap from enemies whatever their soil yields
His army would swarm like those birds, sleep how

178
The birds slept, eat hope while it was yet seed.
He made war with the instincts of a plague,
Read the times like a weatherman, drew the bead
With humour on the determined and the vague.

Struthio camelus camelus, sole survivor of family,

Co-tenant of the Sahara with Homo sapiens sapiens,
Greatest of the predators. One useful homily
For survival is their camouflage, ninja-bird science

(Mistaken in myth as burial of heads in sand)

With a moral for man in it: making oneself
A target is foolish, things get out of hand
One gets hit or worse, one becomes an elf.

Ten gypsies and a caravan, they follow an alabaster

Trail in the tranquil dawn of a Tunisian morning-gift.
A long-winded summer ends just shy of disaster
In the horizon, a lone drone rises into the thermal lift.

Mortal minds imagine happenings at Martyr‘s square

The child carrying her placard with the crowd,
The food lines, toilet arrangements, chance
Encounters of the amatory kind, blood.

179
Also tall ambitions of friendship that stores
As munitions out in the wilderness, for the future,
For the children. But presently there is spending
Money, lookout whistles and a laurel for the lyricist.

*
None invents lightly here, old routes remain
Like old tales, guides to past and future
And departures are luxuries of the vain
Or mad. There are tears that a suture

Can never mend, arid tales of death

By drowning, beached ships of remembrance,
Bets placed for holding one‘s breath
The longest. One-way tickets to France.

To which the light adds a foreboding tint

At sunset. Tenere is a distant cry today
From Izon mangroves, lagoons, the sepia
Tint of dust-free wetlands miles away.

Yet it was here that first it came to light

That Africa will never end, that the shield
Bearing the people resists the lure of night
That the wastes eventually turn and yield.

Beer bottles wrapped in swastikas, peroxide blondes.

Things being the way they are, the Axis wobbled.
Operation Mermaid Dawn by natives began and Italy
Found she couldn‘t help the troops from Germany.

180
Both went aghast, never having suffered such a loss
So complete and by unseen tenebrous hands
With no redeeming features to save or put a gloss
Upon this chapter of horned deception in history.

How much do nations remember of other nations

After dispersal like cicadas in the night?
How much memory survives ruptured foundations
Of the House of Man? How much light?

Desuetude follows incessant blasts of angry winds

Death stalks the marrow for every trace of moisture
A mongrel quiet fills the heart with useless finds
In the season of mercenary hope, offering its pasture

In exchange for life, dangling ripe melons

For a whiff of scarce rain. Every nerve
Stretches at the prospect of relief like felons
Reaching for freedom. What you deserve

Rises in your consciousness in the aftermath

Of sheltering. This is the way of the wastes
This is the moral in the wilderness, the path
That mystics sought from across the castes

*
In the way that the Nile survives the desert, one
Does, reckoning against the perfidy of storms.
There is a thought beyond language in the wild
Glare of desert afternoons, restive as neuroses

181
Loose as rampant persiflage in the gathered oases
Of the Sudan. Survivors travel circumspect
Keep their eyes on known stars and moon
Dare crossings with liquid provisions and dry

Cohering impulses of the long march, taking refuge

In a desert‘s rhythm, fluid as magnificent cathedrals
Where light ploughs the fringes, with a deluge
Of falling marigold camels muttering swear words.

Hadjerat Mektoubat. The stones inscribed.

They are secrets the desert kept of itself
Memories of a different age, memoirs
Of the planet in its cosmic adolescence.

Here, shape-shifters win. Then djinns,

Waifs without shadows inhabiting dreams
As closet companions, the last guests to leave
In their aerial craft of whispering small winds.

And in the year 2099, in another country,

And continent, there is disbelief at a wastrel past,
A prodigal history made manifold across borders
Inscribed upon their histories like gross keloids.

*
Humidifiers drug the air, assaying a cure
With borborygmus of machine interstices.
Nebulized water soothes labouring lungs
In the determined quest to conquer

182
The demons of the desert. Contrails trail them
Sometimes unto the fringe of smuggled pages,
Planting book rust, still the cure outweighs
Contraindications in the patient buildings.

The wind changes course, piles its baggage

Over the burnt face of Sahara, a coming storm
Murmurs distant truths liturgical as language
Warning travellers, with sound and form.

There is singing in the desert-defying silence

As wind rouses the sands into a song
Brown as harmattan‘s, bold beyond pretence
Though finite, whistling with wisdom wrung

Out of the ages, wrapped in earth fables

Border crossings, strides gummed together
Into unity in the flux of nature‘s parables
Yielding gymnast offspring of new weather.

A flock grazes in the slender light of morning

Amidst the myth of righteous kills –
The desert wakes from slumber of the ages
To renewed romance with returning flora.

183
Counsel caution in the virgin territory
Of armoured scolopendria, flying scorpions.
They pretend poorly at extinction, are honed
To purvey mendicant tales before the dirges.

In this dry sea of liquid islands, only the spaced instance

Of water buoys. Resolve the colour seeping through the soil
Of the mind. These were not children of happenstance
Existence breathes through their building toil.

There were locusts here, no more welcome then

Than now, men ravenous as armoured insects too,
Blight to exsanguinated land. The skies when
They take to flight on raids no longer blue.

*
Hoping slaughter away, a Touareg vanguard shelters
From the storm, threatening malevolent riffs
From blurred distance. A boy, only nineteen
Proves true to form, gazing upon an exotic beauty

On his mobile phone. A Kashmiri girl, her turquoise

Dupatta billowing in the breeze of his invention,
Her smile the live mountain goat meet
For the roaring of his mountain lion.

184
*

Winters sometimes come with silvery cauls of snow,

Dip their feet in dry wadi, melt leisurely,
Chastise date palms, renew the frigid vow
Of whiteness with brown earth teat as surely

As the constant poultice mottled with dreams

Of changing weather. These winters are giddy,
White-edged cities of level light beams
Where memory is both song and reedy

Music of winters past. The seasons are genome

And lone memory wandering through absences
Of precise and partisan records, seeking a home
In the solstices and in the heart of primal senses.

*
Teranga Sénégelaise, your heart is wide, your heart
Is deep, sandstorms cannot subsume it
Your will is made of song and steel,
Nor heat nor cold can bend it.

Home is the mat you spread for me

Senegal, home is khalam‘s music, the notes
That fill beyond the feasts of Ramadan,
Home is your welcome embrace of ingress.

One thing about foreign soil: it’s costlier

Every inch than home soil. Dear as the soul
Hungry as hyena. The fields are abattoir
For men, with hard shortcuts to Sheol.

185
*

This field of rich burials, where warriors

Fathomed their last of the Sahara, fills
With scholars intent on what they can
Find. Traces of reasons why the vanished

Race buried so much of warring treasures

With the dead. The nights are cold here
With stale revenants of old incantations
The future waits on toes of disquisition.

From frescoes of Tillasia, glimpse privileged prehistory

Wrought through Berber hands and the earliest
Moors to weather this wilderness and tell the story;
Glean narratives of camel, of date, of conquest

There is nothing new under the sun, certainly

Here in the Sahara there is always the ancient
Burnished to astonish the senses perpetually
Or shielded as cave art from incident.

Clamouring for caramel earth, crescentic dunes,

Interpreting the grammar in the gesture, the o
In Sahara‘s silent void. Let the gathering orgasmic
Storm spend itself to the lees, let the quiet

186
Descend memory‘s steed from wild gallop heights,
To a present so primordial that only fossils move
In the awestruck template of the hour, confirming
That state of being before the Aeolian disturbed.

Sometime, when music seems all that matters,

I wish I were that priest-poet, that poet-priest
Gerard Manley Hopkins. Alas, I am too poor,
Too deep in debt to everything he sang,

Everything he left unsung. The mystic mastery

Of beauty and its violence, the compensatory
Kick of substance, the serene afterglow
And the irreplaceable gash gold-vermilion.

The desert is a disc jockey in the ritual dance

Of Bactrian camels staggering in the wind
Tiara-decked for those who pray in this place
For travellers making their long way home

Skirting serpents crossing sultry sand to shade,

Massively deaf yet matchless for winding motion
Snakeline rebels, belly dancers in excelsis
Gamesmen of alibis horned as very devils.

187
*

Ride the mule of circumstance with me

Let us search for the lost gardener
Vanished from his kept garden of herbs
Absent as joy from the holocaust.

Come, let us seek the sage together

Whose balaclava is the only image
Left of the many tender smiles bleeding
Out of sight and out of all hearing.

For without Adam, orange is the same

As lime, and without his voice the void
Consumes the rain. Ride with me awhile
In search of Adam, the lost gardener

The lost saint of swans and wild geese

Let us seek him out of the eclipse
Perhaps he tends a myrtle or the mistletoe
You, my companion, ride the mule of purpose

Perhaps, entering the desert, the desert

Took him over. Perhaps, turning his back
On forest, his green thumb deserted him,
Perhaps. So rise up and seek within the mist.

*
And druggist turned ventriloquist for crass errors
Meddling in matters of heart and soul
Not for love or song, she marries terrors
To wrench her countrymen asunder.

188
Her multitude of words will not now wash
A jot, a tittle, a scintilla off the massive hill
Of ill-will her ways have built, her rash
Welter of platitudes is now a mill

Around that adorable neck as she jumps

Mouthpiece of a mortgaged conscience,
Lips of a mouth stuffed full of marked notes
To rob naked protesters, women of her land.

What will she do among the women in the end?

Her infamy finds a place within the halls
Of gross invention. She will have a bust
Of livid marble next to murderous midwives

Of our land‘s healthcare. Her heckling song

Will echo in the mouths of schoolchildren
Hark the herald, a child quotes
Ms Druggist that stole our votes.

The desert leaves an ache worse than circumcision

As it ogles the moon stripping its veil of clouds.
The rank green mille of Mauritanian money
Snug in traveller wallet, sufficient for yoghurt.

Among eremologists, skirting Tibesti for myth and tales

The traveller learns of gardening according to griots
And of orchards where gendered fruit, females
Once swamped this aboriginal dwelling of symbiots.

189
*

Romancing unknown quantities, tailored for suddenness,

Marsupial dreams fade out like lonely George
In this hellish antipode of Galapagos
Awaiting glossy black flesh birds.

*
What matters is pith, date tolerance, magic
Strength. Good fortune for when the storms
Break out with mad genies through intersections
Colonized by chance and the art of phallometry.
*

This path the gladiator walked to death

Or glory. In Tunisia, neither victim
Nor victor, with blood he paid to end
The blood sport of craven politicians.

And saints were martyred, history made

Out in the amphitheatres of Tunisia
Where the soil that ate the Afrovenators
Stilled the hands of Roman politicians.

190
*
‗The world is a den of hope…‘
— Niran Okewole

Lengthy work, if it yields nothing beyond sand, let it be

Far from me. Likewise meditation, aspiration and prayer
If they beget but barrenness, let them not tent near me
But if these sprout within a desert but an oasis, let me dare

Let me hope, wielding weary hands and iron pick

To strike spring in a rite of renewal amidst thorn bush,
Arid seasons, dearth. Let me find water and quick
Surcease from floundering in the harsh sun of Kush –

Find me songlines, the ancient paths, the word spoken.

Find me gardeners, keepers, planters who sing and tend,
Nurturers made sensitive to spirit and the unspoken.
And afterwards, let the grace begin that will never end.

191
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

At a critical point in the shaping of this volume, Dr Sola

Olorunyomi of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan,
through his Information Aid Network (IFANET) provided space to
write.
Some segments of this volume have been published in The
Sunday Sun Review edited by Toni Kan Onwordi, the Maple Tree
Literary Supplement edited by Amatoritsero Ede and The Lagos
Review, a literary supplement of Next on Sunday, edited at the time
by Molara Wood.
The first quatrains to be publicly read from this collection
were read at Sahitya Akademi, the Indian Academy of Letters, New
Delhi in October of 2010. I thank the board of the Academy and Mr
Ankur Betageri for inviting Mr Odia Ofeimun and I to read in that
hallowed space. Special thanks are due to Lisa Combrinck and the
Department of Culture, South Africa, for the invitation to read
excerpts from the Senegalese sequence at the Sci-Bono, Joburg, on the
event of Nadine Gordimer‘s 88th birthday.
Mr Odia Ofeimun made his peerless library available for my
use and also made a grant of a computer to me when mine died of old
age. I am grateful to Professor Niyi Osundare for emphasizing the
‗human‘ in the ‗geography.‘ I thank Mr Chuma Nwokolo whose
original foray into the Sahara fortified my resolve to venture. I also
thank the poets Niran Okewole, Damilola Ajayi, Emmanuel Iduma,
Biyi Olusolape and the perspicacious Benson Eluma for reading along
with me and for useful comments.
Mr Ikhide Ikheloa, the digital native, kept a constant eye on
the quatrains as they issued. The ‗Borojah‘, Maxim Uzoatu, also.
Last but not least, I thank Dr Akin Adesokan who ensured
that the writing did not flag or succumb to existential distractions.

192
‘Marrakesh is a hummingbird standing still in the sun
A thesis in motion, stilling tongues and dialects.
I have watched as her streets dissolved in fun
At night, a Möbius rendering of joy’s analects.

Leaving Casablanca and its dreams unfurling

With the calligraphy of seismographs, we try
For a trail left by old Almoravids, night calling
The party to a closet of camphor, bracing and dry…’

In this collection of poetry, his third, the poet challenges

himself as well as his audience. The Sahara mosaic stands
unique for sheer range and scope – from prehistory to the
present. Discipline, sophistication and stamina are
counterpointed by deep, eclectic wordplay and the entire work
is lit by lyric allusiveness and ebullience.

―The Sahara Testaments is remarkable in its blending of

elements from two traditions of the epic – the broad sweep of
the narrative and the intellectual rigour of the philosophical –
with the haunting immediacy of the personal lyric. The audacity
of Tade Ipadeola‘s ambitions spills over the boundaries of his
central trope, the Sahara desert, to encompass nothing less than
an entire continent. Cities and nations, flora and fauna, the
common folk and famous figures, the historical and the
contemporary, geographical features and human monuments, a
diversity of joys and pains are carried along in the flow of the
work‘s majestic verse. Because Ipadeola‘s poetic art cultivates
the fine detail, each of the quatrains constituting this tour de
force is a miniature feat. Collectively, the thousand and one
quatrains stun like an astonishment of flowers sprouting from
the desert sands.‖
—ROTIMI BABATUNDE, Caine Prize winner.

―…literary accomplishment that posterity may use as

a reference point…‖
—JUMOKE VERISSIMO, Author, I Am Memory.

―…avec admiration…‖
— CLAUDE MOUCHARD, Judge, Delphic Games 2009
193 Professor, Paris 8 University.

KHALAM EDITIONS ISBN 978-978-912-555-3