Writings / Poetry

Afam Akeh

Letter to Soyinka

The children of this land are old
Their eyes are fixed on maps in place of land
Their feet must learn to follow
Distant contours traced by alien minds
Their present sense has faded into past.

(Wole Soyinka Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known, 2002)

I am that brood of brats you haunt in verse.
Some feet I know may never walk home.

They are alien to any land.
Memory is not their friend.

They have lived many lives,
are too many lies from childhood.

I am with my fellows less convinced.
I have shit. And I dump.

I dump in poems. I dump on people.
I dream of home and dump.

The world I walk is not your world.
It has neither clarity nor empathy.

I don’t attach. I detach. I am old at faking love.
Not good to be this dry, without oil,

moisture, the old validations, lost in loss
and its foggy sense of years.

Born to a land at war with its young
I fled and still flee.

Not that I quit: I reclaim my stolen life.
Not that I fall, but I wrestle with history.

And you know, you already do.
You too have lived this dark.

Your faithfulness unsettles me,
this sacred trust, your love of land,

all your roads leading home, the homecomings
never far from the departures.

What potion has your name on it?
Is it the weather or women,

the gods that failed,
Ogun the capricious, your avatar?

Is there divorce from a love
that would make and also break?

What talent in your beard is counsel
for my fellows this day of doubt?

For this much is our “present sense”:
Love changed and we changed with it.

We who were never suckled,
we play possum, play chameleon,

play dirty, and dump: refuge hunters,
parallel lives with undead pasts,

breeding abroad unsettled by home.
Distant. Defiant. Divided.

If we end as we have lived
we will be buried away from you.

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About The Author

Author

Afam Akeh, currently at Oxford Brookes University, in Oxford, UK, is a poet-journalist and former pastor. He is the Founding Editor of African Writing and author of Stolen Moments. A second collection of poems, Letter Home and Other Poems is forthcoming.