Three Places

 by Peter Akinlabi

 

Oshun

Who now remembers the dance from which

she emerged, with dual prize of royalty and sadness?

Maybe the king-dancer himself, towering above all memory,

a limbus in the intertwining history of their bodies

 

Some kind of love, like an enticing death, makes

of human stain something holy. Yet her lot was never reduced

to the soul-dripping imaginaries some read as functionally feminine

 

O, there was a time her rage was not yet an anvil enough

to elicit the science of tides; when she too, like Oya,

could still show him her cyber smile or the Lagidigba in vogue,

in the entreating knowledge that he was earthly or could be

 

Did she falter on the way to ‘Koso, wondering

what star could fix her fate, or simply pluck the two balls of tears

leading her when she left Oyo, on her way to rouse the Olokun

for an immersion?

 

Was the wish this exact river?

 

Here, now, you imagine perhaps with her, beyond the chalk

and cowries or the rattling calabashes that ignite the virgin, you imagine

the spirit that must have governed a transition, or a conjoining

of two pairs of eyes – water and fire

 

There were stories draped on her shoulders, stretched and grown,

a lattice of wounds and wants –  a beckoning that waited, in this liquid

sludge to herald its peculiar medium, one who had

come to the meaning of home late, but whose soul grew with

the mother’s matted manes

—————

 

Ogbomoso

Men arrived here, strangers on savannah,

dragging umma and umunna across Sahel and forests,

and for the Ibariba, in stilted masks

 

Men arrived as wars tolled through the borders, leaving the itch

of peace on the earth dimpled with dread of the horsemen. They

drew a map of greys, economy of snuffs and herbs, and finest Kijipa…

But you know the bones of the twins

must have been picked clean in their deified grave…

 

The aged look back and talk about a charter

for a specific misprision.  And how there were always readied cudgels

to assist the peace…

 

They searched for border of memory in the nimbus above

the headstone, where children might lose their way but never get lost;

they searched in the beheading of a fiend and then a king

 

They found true memory in a woman’s wily wail,

Ogunlola, Ogunlola,

where are you going without me?

Shroud-stained, the agogics had preceded the terror

of the state, the cavalry sublimating the fate that would name a town

 

Now suburban chatter reclines in a task of explication…

And the aged are silent, surprised by the cacophony of forgetfulness,

longing for the town whose seasons recurred in the heist of their

inaugurations, the town continuously remaking its slough for sport

—————

 

Takoradi

Let’s not dare a perfect translation now. Absence has left

mud marks quite freely on the possibility of variance.

I arrive here today, a forty six year old microprocessor

I had been laid bare in your native wool, amidst the romance

of your languages, calling forth the rain as a form of spell; I had sworn

the self-enchantment in kinship of dual contrivance

Like the women of Tema, I had picked sea-shells here,

beaching strewn shapes for my miracle; I had mastered the pagan

cadences of your names, sheltering my prayer on the ease

of open waters…

 

Now as to a diaspora of hex, I return to you, as to certitude of rout –

like my father before me, a strangered autochthon, limping

to the tune of doubt…

 

If I halt a bit in the northern dimension of memory, I know

different meanings might transmute a record of transgressions;

and a peculiar beauty, even if of stalking subversion, might insist

on deeper ethnic, one not  mentored in the verdict of the diary

 

I might even peel off the grime of contravention from the frayed heirloom

to re-assemble your soul from Tamale to Ababu. But only you

can open up your darkness to us as a final act of reconstruction

_____________________

Peter Akinlabi writes from Ilorin, Kwara State.