ACROSS THE OCEANS III (ISSUE 6)
AGUTITI: SAINTS GROW OLD
By Michael Achile Umameh
Age like molten magma
With fiery hands
Caressed my grandpa into creases
The dull pounding of age
He wore like a mantle of wrinkled page
Long drawn tapestry of lineage
This tired old world of his age
Donned him a crown of brittle grey hairs
Sickle-bent with the weight of years
That column of youth, now an arc
The firm hands that once steadied
My wobbling infant steps.
Shaky shadows of former strengths
This dancing reed, Agutiti the hunter
Once outran the antelopes of the savannah.
With a masked face, sagging skin
Oratorical prowess tempered with quakes
Even the saints grow old.
But see in his honest humour
The freshness of the wilderness
Of the childhood of his soul.
There goes, my historian, my archive, my sage
This dull pounding
This weight of years
Ripens Agutiti for harvest
Of a thousand jaded lights
Of leisurely caressing arms of eternity.
This is what remains. Chaff
Headstone, memory and phantom
When saints grow old.
PRAYER OF THE DUNG BEETLE
By Michael Achile Umameh
Oh Guardian of the forest floor
Give man and beast
In this pyrrhic quest
Daily fill of feast
That I may have a dung-fest
Of rolling ball of faecal flour.
Custodian of the forest health
Navigates by the clusters of brightest stars
Where man and beast
Have raped the forest wealth
Sister earth, into barren pile of filth.
Cure, this global bad habit.
I pledge. I will care. I will reflower,
The gangrened wounds of Sister earth.
I will rise for Climate change.
Michael Achile Umameh, is a Nigerian-born catholic priest, a doctoral student of Mathematics Education, University of Leeds, UK. He is a published poet and an avid promoter of Indigenous African Literature and Ethnomathematics of the Igala speaking people of Nigeria. His published collection of poems are; The Memoir of the Reluctant Prodigal (2006) and The mills of the gods and other rented tears (2011). His poems have been featured recently in Africanwriter.com; peacockjournal.com; lorrettareveals.org