Saturday, 15 August 2015

EXIT by Oladele Noah

I
A poet may curse thousand tongue
on a collection of species who mock Homer
with their roots, muse and chants of thousand years.

Yet, in the silence of elliptical musings,
the poet slouches between parentheses of caste
and unrivalled casuistry that chimes the Capitalists.

Chaucer, Pope, Eliot lay in linear acceptance
- of a ritual order,
before the vacuum of parallel rhetoric,

relic of tunes and clairvoyant voices.
But he clamps Goethe in fictional tongs,
swears by the Truth of the Bible
and peace of the Holy Quran.

Who bargains a poem for a bottle of wine
to behold themselves found in a cask of beer,
and a hearth for cold nights of insomniac muse –
innuendoes caressing a body falling apart?

A poet may rise like fire
from the fecund slums of Ibadan,
the red earth of the Congo,
and coal-tarred dialects of East Africa
into monuments like five-star hotels in Frankfurt
before we listen to the repose of water

and the voice that seeps into the heart of mountains.

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