Promises Poem by Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

I

The fluid flooded the egg
and enacted the first law of
promises...

Drums celebrated their fulfillments
before salted chalk and feeble
chords of voices on tones of Harmattan.

Then came the halo of the lamp,
holy blue,
a navel of fat-bowelled heaven –
promises ringed.

Moon! was the first name I spelt, puking
my first vowel,
and upon her, my first vow toward lighted
paths of promises.

II

How long does the tale of the moon
go on before it breeds cancer –
cancer of the moon?

The distant stars desire a representative
here on this milking earth.

I crave positive juvenile superlatives
uncommon to any native protocols.

Preceding these,
rabbit-teeth arrangement swears allegiance
to puking-spells and stooling-doom.

Water-frame of the altar arena
in spring-spittle, run errands of
prescience on palm lines of the feet of
broad-treed ancestry.

Clouds of vengeance hang beneath
silver-rimmed contours of promises.

III

But the tale of the moon lives on,
with it, its fertile cancer.
Her face reflected dank leaves of a
strafed forest;
woes of revenants, red-clawed, creased
the very face;
her entire round edge was smeared with
blood, and
strident voices from impersonators
quaked her throne embellished in yellowish gold.

I still reckon with the moon’s lugubrious
stares downward,
and mourned her crippling cancer.
She bled profusely.

But did promises still leave a voice
In this thicket of rage,
even upon the toddling feet of one?

The feet that cross frontiers
across arcades of lesser rage –
such feet stamp on terrains of
promises next to Pharaoh’s ten plagues,
one plague after the other.

And since then
the tale of the moon told for so long,
has bred cancer –
cancer of the ailing moon.

IV

But from where did I slither –
a long, sinuous, voidless approach
of syncope,
noctilucent and buzzard-infested?

I query, for my drum does not come with me.
That Drum! Oh! ...
With slings of the umbilical,
symbol of early initiations at the
ceremony of dark nights.

Is it part of the diary of promises
that the Drum does not come with me
to this age?

Raise your voices and ask for me,
through the painted thresholds of Malaga,
if Picasso returned with his brush.

I still strain for the familiar melodies,
the apt silent refrains of patented rhythms.

Nostomania beleaguers me,
vernal nostomania, stretching from pity
to forestall the fistula
about to creep into the soul of the Drum.

Even among screed, hidden enclaves, sacred,
I search,
flagitating between posts and pillars.