The Harmony of Lost Things

Ndubuisi Martins
Copyright © 2023 Ndubuisi Martins

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be
reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express
written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief
quotations in a book review.

Published in Nigeria.

Konya Shamsrumi Press

40, 23 Crescent, 2nd Avenue,
EFAB City Estate,
Life Camp,
Abuja.

www.shamsrumi.org
A song too hard to pluck

That song says again:

“It soon ends... morning yet comes
after this Darkness.”
The seven-year-old boy heard
the middle-aged man on the street.
The tabloid has it too – hope is a timeless currency;
thatwas when the middle-aged man was
a child. “Now, this child refuses to grow
through all” headlines an old newspaper later
read by a sixty-three-year-old man, waiting
through seasons of hawks and hyenas and
of everything in-between.
Hope leaves a deluge of pain in its repeated
flashpoints, till what remains becomes dry
uncultivable seeds

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Mother turned into a song

Mothers left but THERE remain dripping breaths

in the song notes of nights. wrappers return you
as proof they still care in absentia.

this vacant night clasps you with light wings, comes

as mother’s presence. and this is now the sole song:

father pronounced me a curse, deep breath of plague, called out

that curse from his outward tongue.

and father lit up imagination from baked words.

he said i won’t find colours in life, nothing as sparks
will come.

he swore to stars and moons i won’t fetch the eyes

to see the clear sands of the ocean and hold its water.

he raged at me, calling the earth to spread its spittle

to cancel the lyre of night that will carry me to the palm of Mother.
but,
she, never off course, bequeathed me
a song, a verse to write father into light.

she left me words. and here i find worlds.

the citadel sits as by-products of words father said
i would not find.

now, i find words and the worlds, the colours

of dawn and of sunset.
the soft sands of the sea welcome my legs.

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no distance between me and father’s grave,
yet the night is one letter disguised as light.

i can go onto the vault, pick the minimal pairs

to find Mother’s taste of words that
my tongue once burned for.

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Tide of answers

Let the wind

Let the pipe
Let the windpipe come
through hazels, hearths through
clanks, martial music
of new hyenas’ race
for tide of answers...
Let the tremors of
the quaking sea
be my escort
through the dunes
where camels’ feet rock,
the path and remembering are on
the edge of eternal wrongs...
Make me the reed on the road,
the goitre on highways of hyenas’
lungs, tyrant’s scrub,
masses’analgesic – numb, brittle
for the flaming tongue;
spiking through uneasy silence
hatched here for donkey years.
Make me a tide of answers for still-
birthed calls and long-waiting prayers
reddened by patience in the maternity
of heartless midwives.

Let me be the tide of answers.

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There is a laughter that haunts us

A grin is twice-surprise, two tracks off sunlight,

dark sunlight off foraging sorrow.
And we are clasped by many fingers here:
fingers that braid our hairs and pull at our beard
fingers that soothe our nerves and
ride rough on our contours
fingers that merge our colours
into sodium and ammonia
for eternity of bitterness glossed
with thin love
That is the laughter that haunts us
A wail is music to the sombre wind,
two miles upfront from biting airs
and we are hedged by the warmth of grief.
Amidst steering wheels of bellowing rays, there are:
rays that gallop through our thoughts, rays that
flywhisk our fears, rays that sink blitz with
steady bursts. Here is home where laughter
pinches, where darkness sits interred
in our smiles...

This very laughter haunts us.

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The way answers come

Answers or questions come probing all;

The constituency chief, whose first bow followed convenient absences,
rails in cancer.
The blacksmith, who yawns without iron sprawl for his forge,
settles for false gains.
The singers, whose voices dog-nose cold,
sing dead hymns.
The fast-legged lady, too easy eyes for smokescreen empires,
sags soon.
The farmer that crouches among others’ tendrils
sits on stolen harvest.
And the skunk lover that now crowds the honey pot after
spikes of jilts…

Answers come in garments, sewn in many tongues, spirited nerves,

patched by stinging threads, of scrubby songs, whirl wondering,
filmed too in the nunnery notes, curious embroidery of lovers’ lyrics.
The way answers come are in millipede’s streams, dragging many legs
On the face of the earth that gives it dust enough to live.

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And today answers always to my fears

True that yesterday,

We wanted the moon bright in the night, the sun’s warmth in day
We lay waiting for the spruce, the air unfouled by your belch…

Broomsticks of vices, once the saint in the silent hulks of time,

The umbrella, well known devilry’s totem, now seems a golden past.
I retain the Janus-sabre, cutting the front errant throats, back-forth,
Never in anyone’s weak sleeves of temporal truths, lies en mass,
Chameleon-skinned chiefs, left many drooling for a horizontal stroll.
But what comes as the new bride is again the repeated ritual;
Scavenging dance for tribal smiles, cropping lettuce for elite’s supper.
Here again is the season of madness, the market is in flames
The buyers, huddled in the fiery corners of seller’s tyranny, wailing
And cursing, moaning and kicking.

And now today,

Sewn with old threads, questions leave their twinned marks forlorn.
That had been the song, that is the song and that song still will…

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We Go Bald

Let us count our grey hairs, the ones turned white

with too much night covering our heads, so errant cows
do not eat them. We go bald, herders ranch the hair mass,
till scalp and ringworms become roofs for us.
We who silence sired us into a language
– active verb – which mints us as dissidents.
Herdsmen come for grass, but take women and farms,
burning what grasses the grazing herd crave.
AK47 is the vocabulary of banditry, herders hold them
in cargoes, more than Naija Army. Sheik Gumi says
amnesty is the rainbow that will signal the torrent’s end..
But if you do not own a herd, your head must be bald.

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Answers through the bramble

The lungs will wake in the thorns

of scars. The sun will pierce
through the dark clouds.
A song gathers in this wind-froth pipe,
waiting for birth and rebirths.

Low answers, high answers, scrubby

answers for multi-lect calls.

The brambled house voices,

earthworms fret for their million legs,
wait for jarring rituals. Answers break
decades of silence, mound of wrongs
in the reticent grovel.
Renewed decibel, iron-flames
burn chaffs. Cliffs run into abyss,
no initial narrative, no depths
for Bermuda’s non-returning selves
once these answers claim that tongue of fires.

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Finding Life Again

I find my face in the broken glass pieces

upon which some imaginary streams lived
I find my breath dissipating into water, dropping on the glass, frittered and
flattened before my gaze
I move on the mass bones of my dreams, leaving the plastic dusk, searching a
pebble of remembrance that life once had me
I come into my self again, by the sheer miracle of memory, to live again,
to inhale ashen dust from the fireplace and come into a green self left as shrub
after death.

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The Harmony of Lost Things

i.

I lost a finger to the hot dross of your cultural body, left my language in the
feverish mouthing behind the udala & ube trees, where my grandfather often
sat till the evening packed its memories into the deep.

I lost our strings, orchestras of voices, common moon songs, that Umueze
damp spell of lores and love, opening us into her fair body and leaving us with
nzu, the ritual signs of biologic Earth children.

We left nze, such ancestral path – cramped Ani out of our heads – thrown
behind the past, embraced the piano, the new possession for new baptismal
fires and ways of the wild we find as new music soothing the body we now
own, protected from primal invasion of Ani.

ii.

This is us now being adults, ditching the fit and fib of lores that gave us green
leaves, we take on new blood, left nzu for the children we are no more, that we
cast into oblivion for the machines of the city. We are the shrinking beings
chewing mantras in the plastic sunlight.

Now, we all are accord:

We sing of home from a home, embracing from distance the names we lost
because we must be machines, urban strawberries the city calls refined.

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Ndubuisi Martins is a critic and poet. He is the author of One Call,
Many Answers and Answers through the Bramble (Longlisted for the 2021
Pan African Writers Association Poetry Prize, English Category).

About the KSR Monthly Gazelles

The KSR Gazelles is edited by Carl Terver. It is a monthly publication of five
poetry pamphlets called gazelles, like a chapbook, but shorter. Each gazelle
contains ten poems. Each monthly publication is accompanied by a poetry EP
of poems from the gazelles. For details, visit
https://shamsrumi.org/poetry-gazelle-ep

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