The Dass Poems

Clad within mist-capped hills

Shrouding earthen-ware huts and houses

Content with their age

Like a molo whose secret is pinched

The paths take the murmur

Of these sunny winds

Like halos

The mist cordon the hills at sunset

And the sun retreats behind the tinted curtain,

Assured, the cold maiguard

Will spread its cloak

Around the village silence

On two points

A people grapple

On clattering cycles

Calling two faiths

Into an orgy of trust

Together

On the twin-masts of a point

They till and laugh

And like me

The flies wonder

Just why we are here…

  II 

Evenings

Occasional croaks

From sunburnt hedges

Protest the silence

Of the jaybird

The moon showers its torch

Around the tiny fingers

Of this baby

We stare at the blues

And win cowdung

For the rest of the cricket-walk

We are a bow-legged limp-ton

Morning

Sun bleached in cold

And through the doeful Dass-day

Slipper-hewn sewn balls

Whip against curved rackets

Every walkway

Around the town’s boulevard

  III 

This molo has two strings

And

Everyday

Cast-offs pan out the tar

And sharp stones pick the sole

There is a conspiracy here…

Even Imam

Whose beard is whiter

Than his aged raiment

Is fat in the plot

The policeman;

He pedals quietly

To play his daily game

Tearing down the cane-drink

Around the old beards

with laughter

The size of ripe melons

They wait by the dug holes

In faded babanrigas

And flash lazy gaps as he pedals past

His baton tans a tonne of dust

In a corner shrine at the homefront

  IV 

The giant yalo

And cashew shaped tomatoes;

Lemos, dry-backed

And starched within, sweety sugar trickles

Fighting to hit the peel-décor

Are gentle mementoes

Of an arable lot

Today

Against my window

Errant children hit the sweat

Off pained tins

Amid parakeet whistles;

And tired strains

From a lone kuntigi

Filter the enforced quietude

There is amity here

For a harried soul

But no peace

for a Lagos tussock

  V 

One day

A rage swaggered through

With bows and arrows

The silence was shredded

The pact was breached

Gored bodies plied the roads

And painted faces scoured the thickets

The boulevard was the stage

For a people’s kindled anger

No molo could master the shriek

Of a poisoning arrow

No cycles would dare the line

Drawn with blood

Of the first pairing

That day the rage called

I am glad my skin tanned

In a customary sheen

  VI 

Adura Lere pounds to contentment

In steep bowls

And ill-looking trenches

The fingers burrow into the familiar bunker

And presses out

Even-marshed cannons

For the rolling paster

Daily

She chuckles at the beads

Knotting my lean chest

On rumpled white,

Army greens

And orange ‘boondockers’

Daily

She culls my coins

With the closeness of her tongue

I say little

But thank them that

Prayers

Shell her soft morsels

And few lonely words

Of shared-foreign-ness.