Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

January 16, 1968 - Umuahia, Nigeria
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Echoes from a Dark Corridor

I

Promises are yet unripe.
Trumpets and cymbals from callous pimps
Across the desert reach our aching ears

Night and morn bring forth silhouettes of
Inebriated masquerades armed with whips adorned with
Thorns.
What’s more, their breaths are stale.

Oaths of apostasy are sworn by kinsmen
(they say they have now refrained from our culture and traditions)

Our daughters are neither better;
They scribble salacious letters to feasting male foreigners.
(They vow to elope with the ones with sparkling eyes and fried hair)

Echoes.

The clergy and the laity are two different men lashed by
The same kind of trouble.
The one an exile
The other a victim of protracted despotism.

II

The next echo, loud and frenetic,
Came from the knackers,
And carried with it spurting rage.

Clangs from rusty swords of old pierced the
Doom-darkness of the corridor, a lychgate by the sea
We do not see, but hear,
Yet we saw red placards besieging corner-streets.

Echoes came calling,
With suburban sprits yodelling,
Voicing hate and torture,
Reminding us of year 2000.

Corridor’s breath is rancid,
A monarch’s decayed slab of butter,
Smelling hard like the festered wounds on a
Horse’s neck.

Echoes, too, chill the man in us,
Remaining slogans of horror ever after.

III

The first and the second echoes are children
To this last —
A sonorous echo
Replete with confusion, staccato, and fused
With bits of hiccupping jazz,
Of salted trumpets and puking saxophones —
Echoes of mating crocodiles in wave-confrontations
Of waters.

Lodging among dark corridors,
We are Alcatrazed,
Phased off recent events that include modernised
Funeral rites of
Thomas Alva Edison . . .

And the first, second and third echoes
Form an unarmed regiment of sound,
Blasting proudly through the foundations
Where femurs of martyrs outline bedrocks of
Dammed rivers.
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