4
Listen again now. There is a commotion of drums
It is not about war or our cries of pain
It is not about sickness or our deaths like flies
It is all about the sharing of meat
Listen Christopher to a commotion of drums
Of cleavers and pitch forks and of longest knives
It is a great rumble of the feast of clowns
Children of Nero born at high tide
The Nigers incarnates from the deep waters
Scoffing at the sun the moon the stars
Making music on the floods of sorrow
Over crumbling homesteads weedy pathways
Over passageways flaming with dis-ease
Over passageways of marbled ignorance
It is a joust of giant palace robbers
Pitching wiles against their clones in the streets
Christopher ! Warrior poet !
Blessed with the power of the water of Idoto
The bush burns over the Okpatu hills
But the rodents of evil dance unscorchable
I thrive in the smell of your angry blood
Writhing with the passion of the burning bush
It is a strange grave prison of fire
Without hawks and kites without head-hunters
Listen Christopher to our commotion of drums
The voice of the wind playing to empty scabbards
Where the old flute plays like a midnight wail
For the ears of the restless and the abandoned dead
And tell the ancestors of the elephant stomp
The whole criss-cross and the call of clowns
Tell and tell all the crowned fire-bearers
Tell Chukwuma Nzeogwu and his band of true angels
It is a world of stunning white vultures
Sailing in grace and eerie resplendence
It is a world of laughing hyenas
Redolent in mirth freedom without bounds
Again a parade of wild animals
Growling aloud for a thunder carnival
Burning Bush Continues >>>
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