In Her Own Words Poem by Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

Her language fuses desire with bitter truth.
Early on she told us of the quest for salvation
Through gentle whiffs of collected muffled air
Which she didn’t expect the world to breathe in
One hell of a time.
From the corners of her mouth, I detected courage.
Her eyes, flashy in all manners of piddling evocation,
Made matters worse for her critics – men who grinned
At the nailing of crosses on boughs of extirpated trees.
Her language was steadfast and could retain the abrasive
Tone of a languishing thunder, stripped of its manhood
On the thresholds of weeping northern skies.
Her language was pickled in sauces of frenetic repasts.
She posted whims on the walls of caprices and repeatedly
Jumbled tales with reflections of harmonious bearings.
But she didn’t tell us of the colour of her hair, neither did
She mention the grace her literature gave her.
She is a demure poetess with verses treasured in flagons
Of revival. She coughs loudly, not from the flu, but from
The postmortem of cosseted lines and tendoned stanzas.
Love was crowned with gaunt thorns, piercing in their
Wondrous desire to hurt; so was the language love was
Painted in – sour blue and crested crimsons of hate.
Her manners were smooth in the tales they told.
Her culture was bold in every sense of boldness, and she
Rechristened phrases with sentences the ague would have
Shrunk from.

In her own words, the world was one mass of crafty, sexless,
Bulbous, timorous, blue-hued space.
In her own words, men were skeptical of the lusciousness of
This earth, and espied it from the nut-sized hole of its anus.
Dark poetry smiles not by way of copro fetor of elephant waste.
Oh, no! dark poetry is all about a loving woman’s synthesis of
Boldness with courage – something Shakespeare didn’t have the
Spunk to speak. Something T S Eliot would have chosen to speak
Rather in flawless Maltese or in paraphrased French.
Dark poetry rummages through cankerworms of a satanic society,
Blankly chiding the apostate nature of man on crusts of romantic
Schisms. Dark poetry is scribbled on the northernmost part of Eden,
Where a refugee descries potent stars among sterile galaxies...

In her own words, she braved the tortuous, sinuous routes of
Self-abnegation for the emancipation of the spirit – coiled up,
Wrapped, rolled in one stamen, powdered, massaged with hands
That sculpt clay into brass.
In her own words, we should seek the breath of truth where it is
Snorted from – under aegis of things lying proudly on the spine of
Air. That’s her language; those are her words (non apocalyptic) :
Those are her ideas of saying goodbye to that wayward freedom
We search for anti-clockwise; the jaundiced view of love by society’s
Whim....

Her poetry makes sense – the kind of sense that balances skin and
Ecdysis, just to arrange them in one stretch of lines (non pachydermatous)
But indeed, human.
That makes her human.
That makes her a woman.
That makes her loving.
That makes her true to herself.
That makes her poetry make sense.