Jackboots and helmets demarcate us and freedom. 

Plus in binoculars, multiply with machine guns, divide by 

bows and arrows and the ever ubiquitous police dogs 

who growl yellow teeth, salivate for captured flesh and the 

sum equals a walled city, a concentration camp. Here 

inmates are ducks, our destiny lies with a hunter’s 

loaded gun. Daily we watch killers bump up and down in 

armoured cars, aware that they will shoot should rebels 

venture near the line. Sometimes we hear noises and 

sometimes we see the incidental plume, tall, beautiful, 

shaped like a chute and particles, falling poetically to 

earth and we know that that is another victim gone. 

Always we see stuff, always stuff moves up and down, 

stuff we can’t see but which we suspect to be solids and 

liquids, diodes you can connect and koboom goes the earth. 

Then there are the trucks, laden with fruits and vegetables 

and always trucking out and never in and we wonder why 

oppressors can sit under trees and munch on dates 

while natives grow thin in the legs and fat round the belly. 

The kingdom of man suffereth violence and men of violence 

take it and blessed are the weak, for they shall be decimated. 

The border is where you come when you are done with running, 

when all you want is to sneak among the crowd, read your 

obituary, find out how you died—fast, or slow, alone or with 

neighbours calling your name, uninjured or bleeding from your 

head while shrapnel fell and bulldozers shifted bricks and 

concrete. The border: a net, spun by a spider, cast by a crab, 

dragged by a shark while fish fumble and flounder. The border: 

Ukraine, Gaza, Bịafra, Mexico, Armenia, Rafah—

you, me, the hunger, anger, blood, bile, cold, sweat… 

The border: a flock of queleas when at dawn they 

cloud the neems and jacarandas.

I Wake with the Intention to Show You Beauty

(for Obianuju) 

but instead death strikes in the form of a falcon, 

this dawn of a harmattan season when doves 

preen overnight feathers, coo into the cool 

of sunless clouds—the move so quick, so precise 

it drowns my happiness, cuts short my laughter. 

I watch talons lift, head toward the rocks and the 

lifting of claws is the lifting of pages of a book I 

closed last night for the final time. Or so I thought. 

Memory beckons me, grief draws me to the dance floor, 

I waltz with tribes, waltz with rifles and machetes, spin 

till I become drunk on a war and the chaos it left in bodies 

of a tribe. Here is the bitter truth: in the game of survival 

we give or take all. Beta anụ bụ n’aru nama. Here 

is the music that keeps all nature grooving: the 

python tests his muscles on the bush pig and the deer. 

A pebble, placed in a catapult, shot aimlessly 

cannot save a dove, carried high into the clouds. 

I would not have pointed at birds had I known a 

quest for beauty would translate into a lesson on blood 

and how it can stain our best day…Come, nkeọma, 

return to the room and to mama. Playthings there are 

more rewarding than watching death display his wildest 

skills. A father has nothing to return to than a book I 

closed last night, its commas and comas. That is the balm I rub, 

drug I drink. That is where I fish for answers, angle for 

clues to help me crack the code of country, history, memory. 

Help me make sense of mornings such as this.

I Told You You Would Win a Jackpot

(for Bosede, for Akunnia)

I remember vaguely, not photographically or diagramatically. 

(Nowadays I remember in grey and burnt umber, 

in ultramarine and periwinkle blue). I remember he said:

this is your sister and left a boy to unmorse the code. 

I remember a room and you, stretched on a bamboo bed. 

A crow sauntered across your cheek and a canary 

crooned into your voice at the joy of seeing the bone 

of your bone. I remember that despite the 

needle sticking from your wound we talked and laughed 

ever after. Your fascination with uniforms and boots

matched my fascination with rifles and mortars. 

His fascination with weapons and their makers

canceled our fascination with a world, 

spinning in a space choked with gasses. 

I remember that shortly after the doctors 

laid down their tools in surrender to the power of poison. 

I remember the last scene: it was in my room and 

he sat on a chair, cried bowl, after bowl, after 

desalinated bowl. I remember I looked on: 

was it with a brow of bricks, a heart of stones? 

I remember the trip to Ihiala, green leaves 

stuck in the front and rear, mourners mouthing 

onye o’melu dibe while a giant popped chocolate bars 

into his mouth: the giant being earth, chocolate, 

what remains of earth. I remember you. I remember him. 

I remember the current that swept you away, 

remember the isle where it deposited you, a place 

you wrote to say is the epitome of cool, 

rifles do not bloom and the words stroke and poison 

do not belong in your idiolect.