Songs of Anisha
“To Precious, My Oxygen,”
by Victor Eyo
You consume me like a great poem
Magical verses levitating man to starry heavens
you lift my spirits
Like a streak of sunlight breaking through sombre clouds
In your presence
I feel a thousand sweet sensations
holding your hands
Send millions of volts crackling through my nerves
I want to say I love you
But the word is not born that can describe this feeling
So you are my oxygen
How can I live without you?
“Try Being a Poet In The Midst Of Flying Bullets,”
by Michael ‘Wudz’ Ochoki
(For the Nuba people, North Sudan)
The heat here melts the fat in your neck into liquid necklaces. It’s a furnace of Elo
– the forgotten god of this land.
Here, children write their dreams in sweat: the indelible ink of their brow. It’s the
only way a father’s bullet scar can mean something.
Here, a book is a full plate to a starving mind. And eyes are spoons. Every sentence
is a road leading home. And all brackets look like a parent’s open hug.
Here, hills speak in silent tones, as trees eavesdrop in defiance. Trees – sejera and
ardhef – are stubborn children; accustomed to the indifferent beatings of the sun.
Here, if you were to study an old tree, you would imagine its branches when it was
young, green and naive to the civilized ways of shemis (the sun).
You would imagine this tree as a virgin; before bees deflowered her and sold her
innocence to the birds and the dry gush of wind.
You would imagine its naked branches resignedly spread, like the arms of a one-
legged Indian dancer.
You would imagine the life it breastfeeds to the starved beaks of the rocks
sprouting across these Nuba hills. Hills that bear bullet scars.
And then, beneath its shadow, there’s a quick-sand footpath that leads to small
tombs of children strutting to school in missing arms.
27