The Visibility Trigger
and so they came up over the reefs
up the creeks & rivers
oar prong put-put
hack tramp silence
and i was dreaming near morning
i offered you a kola nut
your fingers huge & smooth & red
and you took it your dress makola blue
and you broke it into gunfire
the metal was hot & jagged
it was as if the master of bronze
had poured anger into his cauldron
and let it spit spit sputter
and it was black spark green in my face
it was as if a maggot had slapped me in the belly
and i had gone soft like the kneed of my wife's bread
i could hear salt leaking out of the black hole of kaneshie
i could hear grass growing around the edges of the green lake
i could hear stalactites ringing in my cave of vision
bats batting my eyes shut
their own eyes howling like owls in the dead dark
and they marched into the village
and our five unready virginal elders met them
bowl calabash oil carafe of fire silence
and unprepared & venerable I was dreaming mighty wind in trees
out circles talismans round hut round village cooking pots
yam cassava groundnut sweetpea bush
and then it was yams again
birth child hunter warrior
and the breath
that is no more
which is birth which is child which is hunter which is warrior
which is breath
that is no more
and they brought sticks rods roads bullets straight objects
birth was not breath
but gaping wound
hunter was not animal
but market sale
warrior was child
that is no more
and I beheld the cotton tree
guardian of graves rise upward from its monument of grass
crying aloud in its vertical hull
calling for crashes of branches vibrations of leaves
there was a lull of silver
and then the great grandfather gnashing upwards from its teeth
of roots. split down its central thunder
the stripped violated wood crying aloud its murder, the
leaves'
frontier signals alive with lamentations
and our great odoum
triggered at last by the ancestors into your visibility
crashed
into history
from Middle Passages 1992 (37-40)