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
