3 POEMS BY EMMANUEL UMEJI
COMMUNING
today a white mark appears on my face
it is summer & the winter hanging
above my roof had wrapped her water
in her womb awaiting a new winter to
spill her rain-beads & today it’s winter
o’clock & summer is holding her dust
into her oesophagus, awaiting another
summer to belch them out. i look into
the garden in winter, & saw the green
revolution of fruits &floras, awaiting
the advent of summer to ripen them up.
so, i’m communing this poem with
the tale of the moon & the sun: where
the moon arrives to inhabit the face of
the sky at night & leaves the sky at
daylight for the sun to sit proudly on its shoulder.
IF THE FIREWOOD COULD SPEAK
mother, whose tongue has mastered a million languages that teaches her children the norms
that originates from the gene of generosity.
this time, she speaks in the language of her cooking firewoods to teach us about unity— an origin
from that same gene of generosity.
she talks about the communion firewoods share
in their midst:
how they only yield flame when their heads
are fused as one like the blades of a ceiling fan.
how when they are half-burnt, they smoulders,
an epitome of weakness,
an epitome that sticks of broom needs
to be collected into a broom before
they could serve their purpose.
‘but’ she says, her tears leaking through her words,
‘but it stings me each time i think of men
& how they have become wind that refused
to be gathered into a sentence, into a broom,
into a coterie of flaming firewoods, into a note’ [to toil]
DRIED LEAVES & SUNSETS
father plucked a lesson from sunset to water my naivety.
he pointed his finger like an arrow to the flood
of dried leaves that floored our compound,
& said— son, death is like the sun,
& we are leaves. in the morning, those leaves
hung gaily on that fig tree, swaying in bliss
with the innocence of a child
who knew nothing about death; feeding our
eyeballs with their pretty green hue
before the sun came unforeseen in its harshness
like pharaoh & parched them brown & dropped
them from the tree without giving a thought
of which of them was to fall off first, as per age.
look, child, we should always write
a reminder in our hearts about the rising
of our sun. let our hearts
continue to maintain the colour of snow because
none of us knows when our sun shall
rise to parch us, to abscise us from the tree of life
& morph our names into sentences of dried leaves.
ABOUT THE POET: EMMANUEL UMEJI
Emmanuel Umeji is a writer, award-winning poet-author and memoirist known for his poignant and reflective narrative. His works have been published by reputable online journals and magazines. He lives between Eastern and Northern Nigeria, currently.
