Chinyere G. Okafor
Excerpts from It Grows in Winter and Other Poems by Chinyere Okafor
MY LOVE GROWS
IN WINTER
My love for you
grows in winter,
When the grass
turns brown,
And birds
return to their nests.
My love for you
feeds on shrubs.
It eats the
thin leaves of winter.
The hills that
litter your waist,
Are seen in the
sundry curves,
And colors of
Swazi fields,
Laid bare by
the winter winds.
I gaze at the
darkening meadows,
I fear and
wonder how your love is.
Is it cold like
winter biting my body?
Is it making
fire in the chill of distance?
Do not echo my
fear, that you call me deserter.
Heartless one
who left, in harmattan of our life.
Not so, dear
land, I am no deserter.
I am still your
own clinging to you,
And claiming
your love so scarce,
In this
harmattan of your life.
I shall still
come to you,
Even in your
battered shape,
Disfigured by
strife and all that came in the new harmattan.
I shall come
smelling of fondness and shining of distance;
You will have
no choice but to forgive my brief desertion.
Truly my love
grows in winter for my battered homeland
AN EXCERPT from GAZING AT WIDE COUNTRY:
WIDE COUNTRY
Wide country that stretches my
eyes to the
domain of memory,
Where landscape of imagination
is watered by
contemplation.
You salute my body with hefty
winds,
You assault me with crowds of
wind,
That wrestle my path as I jog
by the lakes of
Wide country that washes eyes
with waves of
acclimatization.
Rain, hail, sun and all that
fight for space and
wrestle irritation.
You caress my body with waves,
That soar to abode of memory.
Wide country, you are the one
that defies poetic
imagination.
My dears, you need to see the
place,
To imagine its essence, and
drink the cup of
wide country ...
(Published in the National Association of Women Writers’ magazine, Sept. 2003).
FRAGMENTS
OF NINE-ELEVEN
But its form
stared vacuously at me,
Daring me to
resist its alluring bait.
I dashed into
my room for a pencil,
To capture this
seductive picture.
But it laughed
heartily,
Asking whether
I picked poetry,
Like berries in
watery curves of
The curves of
To feel its
contours and drink its essence.
Glass glazed
the hand that dared to trap a spirit!
Blood and pain
forced me to realize,
That it was the
image of my body,
Naked in its
original form,
That laughed at
me through the bathroom mirror.
I picked the
broken pieces,
Merged them
with bloody elegance,
Like pieces of
nine and eleven.
Can we put
together, can we capture,
Can we remold,
can we kill nine-eleven,
So that it
never lived to hunt and hurt,
With bloody
elegance that smears as it builds?
Fragments of
nine-eleven,
Please, leave
us in peace to bury the dead?
2:45A,
3/11/02
For
more poems, see It
Grows in Winter and Other Poems
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Excerpts from It Grows In Winter ... Last update: November 30, 2009 Web page by C. G. Okafor |
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