The Gathering of Bastards

The reverent and abundant poems of Romeo Oriogun’s third collection, The Gathering of Bastards, return continually to the sea:

    What is the origin of anguish?
The sea
knows the secret of places.
Once, it was everywhere.

The sea, a place of return and departure. The sea, path of the slave ship: “Even in tears / of origin, there is no atonement enough / to restore a people lost to a ship’s belly, / no forgiveness.”

The sea, marker of Oriogun’s homeland, Nigeria. In “It Begins with Love,” the speaker, whose “sole fear / is the world so full of love, so full of loneliness,” reflects:

I have panicked, wondering if to hold a drowned body
is to hold a part of myself. And from across the open
field, we hear it, a fisherman’s rescue call, another body
washed out the river; we run toward it. It begins with love,
I tell you, even burial–the hand covered with sand,
a crown of seaweed. I walk to him; a song leaves me.

The drowned, the murdered, the buried parents, but also: the exiled, the ones left behind—these poems move as elegiac prayer, in celebration not only of the dead, but of the living, too. The speaker “imagine[s] the goose, / whose partner is dead, dipping his head into water / to understand loss. I had hoped this wouldn’t be me.”

“Where do I go from here?” asks the speaker in “Lamentations.” At the conclusion of “Full Moon," the speaker is both beholden to the past and continually erased by it:

I admit, I have learnt how to obey
the past. I keep nothing, I own nothing.
My bag, black, is beside my bed. Beside darkness
lies my little pouch of stars. The night cares
only for lovers. When I leave, I was never here.

“It begins with love” is the title and refrain of the book’s opening poem and it captures something of how these poems navigate borders—between land and sea, between living and dying, between belonging and exile. In “Crossing into Togo” the speaker attests: “I was at home. Yet I was at a border.”