Poetry - Sagehood: A Return

By Barfee Gideon Wirndzerem

You never went as you have come:
The salvo and the reverb that stole
The thunder’s loud axe and came back–
We will tell you what! – with a dove’s coo.

Yes, Dreaded son, First-in-Line-of-Iron-Forgers!
Whose skull crushed rock like pottery
Whose bone cracked bone like bamboo,
One in whose hands iron became dry wood!

We fearfully awaited your harvest of death
When we had awaited the god of iron,
Awaited the days of volcanicity and fire:

The furnace we feared will forge the metal,
The blood we dreaded will knead the mud,
Matter for the temple of your return!

But you surprised us with your innocuousness.
For here we are tonight, concerting by simple hearth,
Massaging the old and taming rheumatisms,
Nursing the very wise diseases of age,
And living an unexpected peace!

Yes, those soils of distant lands and years
Long settled on your retired feet –
Pacific accretions – harvests of peregrinations
That tamed the thunder of your sensitivities.

Isn’t it the very soil where we sowed wise seeds
Gleaned from the growth of your wintry locks?
Isn’t it the same earth of time and pilgrimage,
Same from which your now pious hand’s midwifery
Teaches us at this dawn to unravel sagacious scriptures,
Symbols stitched to the patterns of the Apocryphal braids
Of your pilgrim hair?

Sagehood is from the author’s recent poetry collection, Bird of Oracular Verb (2009).

Comments

[Dzekashu MacViban]

This is a poet who has a unique vision of poetry and life and is rooted in mythology and Africaness.