Anti Poetica

No poem for the armored tanks stained with blood and mud,

grated flesh and meat, sinews on pavements in Oguta.

A man, his neck leaking like a broken pipe.

No poem for the dome of bunkers, the government of tear gas,

whole sentences of grenades, all of these a kind of imagist heritage—

one man’s remembrance of a country to another.

No poem for the ringing of the perfect past.

The blade and the silence of steel is the prologue of history.

No poem for the priest, the Imam, the doctor

who confirmed the death of forty-three men to the state after Babangida’s sentencing.

Forty-three men tied to trees, their lives blown into the skyline of surrender.

No poem for the dead and their devotion to the volta of death.

No poem for Emmanuel, Chike, Akachi, sons of Janey Ajala,

descendants of biafra, my blood.

Forgive me for inviting you into the unsafety of language.

No poem for unmarked graves, for the fifteen-year-old boys in combat uniforms

buried without combat uniforms so that more boys may wear combat uniforms.

No poem for absence. Its aqueous face. Its wings like years. Its years like ridicule.

No poem for the misconstruction of violence as readable,

therefore inferable by the imagination.

No poem for my deep suspicion of my telling of unwitnessed history.

For the old abattoir where the unclaimed corpses of the ’69 war

were gathered like rocks, carpeted with decades of hay, and lit.

No poem for old tusks, for shillings, for green bottles

of Seaman buried in earthen pots in my grandmother’s backyard.

No poem for the masters, white men reporting the war they funded.

No poem for the years of postwar reconstruction,

by which I mean rulers creating new states to redact old wounds.

No poem for the sovereign state for which my great-grandfather died unfreed,

body wrapped in sack and hurled into the grave like cargo.

No poem for the ones forgotten in the bunkers,

forgotten in the graffiti of war, forgotten inside history,

forgotten outside the body. The unpunctuated subordinates of the world.

The sexagenarians. My grandfather, dead. Teacher, dead. Old-soja-never-dies, dead.

All of them inside Biafra. Faces interpolating inside faces.

Faces ebbing toward image but returning to the immaterial past.

No poem for the absence of denouement. Decay recognizes us.

No poem for the poem whose précis is against history.

No poem for the imprecise language of violence.

No poem for the year of paper notes.

The year when coins were exchanged for a new kingdom.

The year where I yelled, young and stupid as a bone,

No poem for my childhood songs—

          Ojukwu wanted to separate Nigeria

When the war ended, my grandmother returned to Aba,

the city half burning, half memory.

On her arm, her husband’s name tattooed on the safe of skin.

Ajala, he was called, meaning traveler. Not returnee.

No poem for the 60,000 amputations in the wake of that war.

No poem for postwar prayers.

My grandmother praying the rosary in the pew of a half-burnt church.

The sculpture of the virgin fallen.

The windows crushed into crystals waiting to be swept into paradise.

My grandmother, how she lifts her hands to god.

How she lifts god to her scars. How she calls her scars god.

No poem for my grandmother scrubbing the floors of the old house.

Gathering bullets into buckets,

shoveling sand into pots and mopping the scent of war with rags.

No poem for the ones we killed.

No poem for the poet’s shame. Its small and ineffable convolutions.

No poem for the poet’s desire to deploy the first-person plural we,

hoping like the old masters to forget in collective language

the life we lived for all that violence.