Notes on Obscurity

1.

Sister Mustard died someplace

Mount Ebola, I think, in Africa.

They planted a mine on the headstone

For a curious little boy to play with.

 

Kaboom! and his lost limbs won

Weeklong notice on international news.

Sister Mustard turned

And smiled in her death…

 

2.

The ants laboured hard in the sun

On the trail of the ancient wisdom.

But this year the rains did not fall. They waxed

Lyrical—Hard Rock melting sand-home and barn.

 

Afterwards camera crews rushed

To scoop water. Their

Precision instruments annotated

Wreckdom to its last microscopic fractal…

 

3.

The poetaster wrote his dying song

After years of ruing the ignominy

Of his canticles, the evil recalcitrance of his stylus.

He published it, a warning to others trying the impossible.

 

But the scholiasts, hard up for new conundrums,

Overturned every stone.

They scoured every cave

And dispatched an embassage to his headless grave…

 

4.

And Daodu, born on the first day

In the Year of Jubilee, a platoon of teeth

Fortifying his infant gums,

Died an agèd plenipotentiary with 300 monuments.

 

And worms went to work on the annals.

And blood and fire quarrelled with the city year after year.

And a generation arose in whose memory

Daodu’s name, indecipherable, was a dead talisman…

 

Benson Eluma