AWS Ode: African Writers Series
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- AWS Ode*African Writers Series
So long a letter the slums numbered spines and night fell bright as the will to die, or the joys of motherhood. Its beautiful feathers.
Black and white in love. The wound is proof “of how terrible orange is,” black sunlight. Here’s Nuruddin’s Sardines. Beware soul brother
the thirteenth sun is a child of two worlds. A hammer blows its ambiguous adventure. Because of women, a woman in her prime,
Zambia shall be free. The smoke that thunders thunders like a sunset in Biafra. Robben Island neglect is worse than Lokotown regret.
Girls at war with a question of power like Efuru and Idu survive the peace like wrong ones on the dock. The mangy-dog we killed detained interpreters. [End Page 1056]
A blade among the boys, bound to violence, ripples in the pool. Maybe the mourned one was a naked needle riding on the whirlwind. A man of the people.
Maru, bewitched, Maru, going down river road, eating chiefs, their dead roots, will kill you quick, quicker than this earth, my brother. The barbed wire satellites.
A simple lust, the smell of it, ordained by the oracle. I remember Ruben’s masterful use of silhouette. Small pass books with powerful faces, passports.
Wirriyamu, an ill-fated people, the grass is singing not even God is ripe enough. Devil on the cross, my Mercedes is bigger than yours, your narrow path’s uneven ribs.
Some short century for sure, the busiest political spider web in nature and this most difficult thing to hold together, was held together by Heinemann, the healer of God’s bits of wood. [End Page 1057]
Thomas Sayers Ellis, a native of Washington, DC, is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. This co-founder of the discontinued Dark Room Collective also teaches at The Lesley University low-residency MFA program in Cambridge, MA. He is author of The Maverick Room, winner of the 2006 John C. Zacharis First Book Award, Song On, The Genuine Negro Hero, a chapbook, and The Good Junk (Take Three #1). The University of Michigan Press will soon publish his Breakfast and Blackfist: Notes for Black Poets. He has also published poems and interviews in Agni, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and other periodicals. He lives in New York City.
Footnotes
* For Chinua Achebe on the fiftieth anniversary of Things Fall Apart.
