A poem in which my body is a path to history.
After Biafra days.
The breeze is a deaf body & we float
through the road & its language. We
have come to the city made out of hard
rocks and pain. The city, awake in its fragments,
in the marvelous cycle of noise. Traders
chant hunger in loud adverts as if to say;
come, shed your pockets for fresh nut. What
asks for space is being crushed in Owerri,
statues molded out of conscience of culture &
two boys said they were molded on the earliest
days of war. Every road leads to stories, at Okigwe,
where the red flowers of chaos had first blossomed,
the birds had come for a feast of seeds with bits of
burnt photographs we now meet in the museum at
Obiohia. Here, what is old is being praised, old drums
cracked by dirges of wild men
hanging in the tired light of deposition. Again
I open my mouth to sing the wildness
walking into my heart, to say, body dance,
dance into the light of history.
© Fatihah Quadri Eniola
Born on a Friday in December, Fatihah Quadri Eniola is a young African Poet. Her work has appeared in literary journals like Ice floe, The Shallow Tales Review, The Kalahari, and many notable others. She is nyctophobic and lives with a very cute cat, Honiy.
The Loch Raven Review 