Chiedu Ezeanah

The Spinner of Dialectics
 

“If you want to know the sex of the lagoon
 Jump, jump into it, and you will suffer
 The swollen silence of rebirth…”

 (The Poet Lied – Odia Ofeimun)

 He spits virulent tirades against everything,
 Because he must meet a vituperative need.

 His supernal sense of human solidarity endures
 In sundry fixations, and in his pet slogan-

 Everything is political. The end justifies the meanness.

 He dabbles in every discourse to sell his hit.
 He spawns treatises even on the dialectics of silt.

 Tons of dusty manuscripts celebrate his sagacity.

Like the undertaker, he beats his chest in triumph
 For dispatching an older poet to his “literary tomb”.

 He would gossip and meddle in another’s young matrimony.
 He would suck the bliss in every wench, but won’t dare marry.

 Blind to the funny image rambling in the mirror
 He harasses the air in self-ballooning anger…

 Song of a Post-card
 (For Charles Ogu)

 “Post-this, post-that, post-the other;
 Yet in the end
 Not past a thing not
 Understanding or telling
 Or forgiveness”- Seamus Heaney

 Past somesaults of seed and sun
 Past showers rousing the earth-
 Words become toys, or, theories flicked
 Past the grasp of promise and response-

 Hidden in the corsets of texts, and nowhere else?

 Time is over-run by assorted brands
 Of legends of reading and resurrection
 Of meaning and being, between posts:
 And nowhere else?

 For nothing exists beyond posts?

 And who determines the posts?
 The post-paranoid critic? Read my post-card:

 Let’s give the stale posts a break
 Let’s foment fresh textual kicks.

 (Extracted from Song of Songs)

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