I
when the time came

in that small world of

half-woken stars

and broken moonlight

we were gathering palmnuts

un-cracked palmkernels of

previous years

lying silent in the dust

breeding thick and lice

termites eating away detachable peelings

and building endless houses,

eating up sand

I was a boy of unspecified age.

It must have been the time

we took ogwu uwa- the drug that

cured the whole world:

I don’t remember.

my father knew everything for us
II
he wrote all –

our memory – in

his St. Martin’s de Porres Prayer Book, half-eaten

by worms: birth dates,

the date of his father’s death

and that of his mother (she died of

water disease, or so, his footnote),

dates of lands leased out

and the leaseholders’ names

and the reasons for the lease

like the return of dowries

when her sister divorced

a barren husband of many years;

the date he buried her too

(she died of madness or

adultery or so),

the leaves of the Book of God

are also interspaced with

receipts of old sales,

weatherbeaten complimentary cards

with long-distant dates,

wedding invitation cards,

receipts of beer bars,

guest house lodgings

and stopover names

receipts of Sacramentals and

dates of completed Confessions:

(baptismal cards

or dates of child dedications? No),

sketches of unknown animals,

or was that a skeleton of an owl?

or naked bats?
III
he hid the Book of God

in an iron box that day

he saw me watching the portrait of

the Saint. St. Porres looked like

someone in pain, angry, helpless, the flesh on

his face folded into indistinct shapes,

like a mother weeping an only son.

at this time, father no longer smiled,

he ate his teeth so often

and climbed

his woodbed every night reeking of gin

He died later, gathering all his

old music record tapes at the head of his bed

his candle rosary on his neck
IV
I don’t remember,

my father was memory.

Or was it the time we

used to run about naked in the village,

playing hide and seek

or when we used to bathe in the streams

and sometimes hide away the

clothes of bathing women?

I don’t remember.

I only remember wet

soaking up the raffia mat and

our urinating on soldier ants

in the daytime could not help

as Mama Nnukwu would instruct (they

refused to come for us in the nights

and we wetted the dreams as if it was daylight).

Our clothes,

mine a jumper and shorts

with a pair of round holes at

the bottoms
V
we would wake up in

the midnights, run

to the fireside,

sit on the fire,

burn the liquids

gather smokeclouds and

smells of fire

enter the cloth blanket again

and feel warm:

In lying head down

Kachi’s head facing Mama’s side

her legs overtaking my head

she was a grown woman

and I would rise, as I always did,

and she would fall –

we burrow aimlessly into

each other’s mid-regions

the big mother snoring

away her peace in her bamboo bed –

sometimes she would wake,

stand on us,

calling Kachi, waking her to

stop talking in her dreams:

we were awake as rats under the cloth.
VI
Kachi’s mother has been

seeing the Mother of Christ in

front of the village Chapel,

close to the Church cemetery since

She left;

and that was after she said to me

after many years of getting lost in the world:

“Owom, you are now a big boy”

and we shared a smile.

In that palmkernel house of my grandmother,

we gathered stray nuts

in an unpaid labour; we

gathered them to make heaps of fun

we played on the heaps: I, Kachi and others

then we destroyed them at

the next cock crow.

Kachi left without confessing

our sins on the heaps of lice sands

she died of no disease,

she just died.

Last night she came in

my dream and gave me her mouth.

I now speak in the name of the dead.