The Road to Epe | by Oyin Oludipe

January is the deity month, hatching

Flies in rainbow mote, warping

Stars in sweet lather of smoke,

Warm roots of barefoot hills, rending

Wood to fire, cauldrons

And spices of primal feasts

Silhouettes and drummer tides around

A fragile bed, a spot of veneration

Till an infant cry usurps the roar –

In that hour unfolds the Road

Or the merely fated – the Road to Epe,

Dawn songs all, from heart to feet, paring

Time, awakening new sensations.

And down I went, quester in bond

To a new race beyond the sun

Where green invades the lagoon

And constellations of earths, wedded

To thousands at the haven of a lonely coast

Of dark, a nation’s sliver vanished

In ethereal motion, I – weary traveller

To an absent shed, sealed in night hours

And though the hours set me free where

Chimes of bliss assail the Road

Swirl, heedless to smeared poles

Of the vile, interloper and stooge –

Libations sped on, in market shrouds,

Commerce and burdened contraptions of haste,  

Streets no less primordial than masked

Spirits, ally to ancestral shores decreed

Recalcitrant. They sprawl above the realm,

Muse to the undergrowth – a people

Indifferent to lost presences and passions,

Legend and history, levy and homage

Tethered to forges of relish and rigour

And rigour is romance of the Road,

Rigour of the first and repeated spasm,

Of the wandering soul, incarnate where

Races merge, as Epe’s Otin charts

Nile and Congo, Maputo or Turbeville

In the marrow of Nigeria, as crossways

Bare sensations of a distant Paris to Bangladesh,

Ticklish outrage scales the bound and lineages

At junctures of bargain, seams of greed,

Routes of creed, antipodes of spite,

Strife and zeal – where sweat rages

A pottage of oil and soil marks the core

Nude wealth, roused by a mottled arc

That ageless heap on the mountain-top

Stems around our union’s largesse

Yet the Road consecrates –

Where rust pervades, where tongue

Is tassels of dung, where brisk leaps

Of water spell one with lust

As the twist of flesh on lethal curves

Of untruth, the crest of tyrants…

The Road consecrates, the Road mends

Beneath the tired scab of an era’s anathema

Compromise in a revel of wrongs,

All grim rites of lost histories

Smothered in storm-hungers and

Silent agonies of hidden voices

Yet the Road to Epe is loud, declares

The pilgrim lane sanctified, oblivious

To a world’s feeble charade, as

Guardian to fragile troves of the mind,

The spaces of dreams as last petitions

For reason. The Road to Epe remains

Inviolate, and all silver throngs of the

Ocean waves, clever wares, a souk’s liturgy

Strung in Tilapia smoke, a masquerade’s

Ululation from beaded canes and dirges

Of hawkers from ancient caves…

Into that arch the Road leads;

And beyond. My feet leads the way

Homewards, where eyes see no demons

On the next crossway, and denizens

Of all marine stoop to capture the tides

Into that last corridor across

The vault of horizons.

(Verse One, Deities)

Photo Credit: Minella Akudinobi