Five Poems by Osahon Oka

pose: live/ love…

scream unhealthy metal, slip of knife leather tooled by worn down fingers; knotted
rheumatoid, cataract eyes, time pooling from broken blade, the drudgery, lengthy, constant—a
chipping away at the bone, the meat lean as squeezed sweat—struggle from mud back to mud.
knee buckling, warhorse, war orphan, war? work? artillery factory women in aprons filing
machetes with orders against bringing babies to the office, where lands are tilled, bones burnt,
trees left with green shoots & the humus—carrier of all burdens, that return into sheath opens
bloody maw eat! eat the rank day as weary hands shake the casket pressed into earth. here, the
epitaph, the elegy for the abused cemetery, undertaker—rustler of dead leaves. boot heels on
concrete, restless women wait drunk men—ten thousand per night for her worn breasts & his
weak erections, cigarette smoke, cannabis, coverall grease, lie after lie, home in the moon, in
truth, gutter’s hungry mouth howling at the door, empty wallets, daybreak terror, assembly line
monotony, boredom like time—vacation, cancer, death. fist fight in anger & love, battered
door, broken teeth, child, beautiful child—love, play, stories in the dark—& mother—warm
breath, weary laundry, sex; monotonous, missionary, tears; silent, soft body earthquaking
alone, alone fist stubbed into blunt instruments. retirement—pensions, debts, disability checks,
stressed walls, raised bridges, broken down dreams, Amen.

We work

Like Cain, we push water
into their mouths.
We wander.
We build their cities with our blood.
We break.

Deboned, we sit in the esophagus
of song, where our people find names
for the thing that is paining them.

We rise from the mud,
fingers wrapped around the throat
of God: Answer our prayers, Father,
lest our people say we too have failed
like the day & its promise.

In the eye of the Moon,
we are bent at the loom,
weaving tomorrow into being.

Under the rain & in the sun,
we struggle with Earth.
The earth, a Colossus,
we are the abject Telemachus,
finding father in every man or woman
who dares to say, Come,
be with me,
let me show you
how this world works.

The world works & like
a poorly paid
& abused workforce,
Her anger is infinite.

We cry,
in the tether of night,
what the day demands.
Waiting like school children,
for break, we break.

No one sees
the pile of bales we burn
with the rotting meat of our bodies.
Another day must come, & then,
curved like rodents inside traps,
we lift our burdens.

On crooked spine, we lift
our burdens, & as camels,
we stumble through arid wastes,
seeking water,
seeking green,
seeking life.

Sometimes we cackle,
shocking birds into flight.
Sometimes, we are comatose,
in the depths of drink,
in sordid tenements of regret.

Most times, we are waiting,
for anything, to befall us.

Works without faith is nothing

Argue with my hands, Father,
scarred tissue hidden from sight.
Gleam the showers falling
from the stars we picked
from the beach, where the flat-eyed fish
were once ours to plough.
Now, sailors die on foreign shores,
seeking who plundered us.
They are gone, sailor and quarry,
a thing of myth now.
They dance the waves no more,
their songs skittering like stones
through our bones
when we watch the sea return.
As we scavenge for night
among the vanquished day,
its carcass open to the gullet
of our lost whine, we count time,
expecting reparation.
We pilfer the detritus of men & women,
walking in & out of their shadows,
their hands grey & disjointed
from holding too long to dust.
They have toiled & carried burdens,
their eyes drunken at the corners,
their hands scarred with abuse.
We pick the things they leave behind,
once totems of their dreams,
now filled with carrion and rust.
We gather them into our barrows,
roam on & on, itinerant preachers
of a new god of gold.
We hawk our souls before the sun,
we yield ground little by little.
We do not go to church for blessings.
We do not leave our altar where we gut
the bodies we find for precious stones,
& sometimes force menhirs
of rigor mortis towards movement.
We go for Thanksgiving.
We are the iron children,
the eaters of sin,
the convicts of society.
We hustle truth across the land,
everything decays & we have found a way
into the blood clot, of this, our life.
We find exhaustion, and the manacles
of our neo-slavery spin around our ankles.
Like ants, we shuffle out into dust,
hands stretched before us,
blind to the next ledge, the next fall,
hoping for an increase.
With bigger mouths to feed,
we are waiting for answers,
but God,
does not care for works without faith.

How often do you look at the moon?

One day, I’ll work hard like this round Moon,
holding on into morn,
yellow like the end of the world.
I saw it rise white as alabaster,
big as a communion wafer,
brighter than the headlights
startling the old cock on the road.
It hung there in the cold harmattan,
as the dust rose & rose
from all our shuffling to & fro,
searching for a return,
for all the heavy lifting we’ve been doing
since we first crawled out here.
I watched it turn yellow with age,
ruined to the bone,
& still, it hung there
like my father wearing his French suits again
after retirement, because there is never enough.
Morning is almost here,
when the kids become raucous
with their joy for another day of play.
For us, already battered against life,
it is another monologue with our fingers, we begin.
Soon the moon must retire from her service.
Many will not remember her.
We always keep our heads down in the city,
shuffling, gathering dust, counting
each step towards the next pay day.

Every labourer is deserving of their wages

How many labours did Hercules do
before he found emptiness? The sage

says the labourer is deserving of their
wages. The wages of sin is death, says

the sage. Sin is labour, the poet says — a
struggle towards hell. Who can live like

that? To carry burning, to bend back
towards cruelty to oneself? But it is

pleasure also, at least until that drug
wears off & the scream begins to rail

against the throat. For the distance
between pleasure & pain is a needle

point, an atom of splintered nerve-
endings, a conditioning in the brain.

& is hell not enough pain & do we not
meet it each morning as we clamber

out of sleep to forage the earth,
hungrier than yesterday? & if heaven is

in the eye of a needle, why won’t I
grovel in the mud, carry my burdens

like the preacher — leave father, mother,
lover, child & wander the wilds? To be

rich? What does it profit a man, if he
gains the whole world & loses his soul,

as the sage says, it doesn’t mean there’s
always profit in labour. We’ve been

lifting these blocks here & the sun’s
low, the sweat’s black on our skin &

still the foreman cannot be found. Who
will inherit the earth if not the poor in

spirit? Who labours in vain, if not the
lowest of the low? What is an eye of a

needle to a rich man? How many
needles can he buy? What is labour to a

sinner? For do we not work at evil in
the blindness of night? Do we not

make plans to maim, to kill, to destroy?
Is there no pleasure in it? Is there no

pain? Is this not a man hard at work?
But I deserve my wages, even if it be in

the den for drink, or in the soft arms of
paid sex, it finds use. I have worked

hard for them. Everything I have, I
laboured for, even the scars around my

knees, my back, my lips, my soul. I have
earned my heaven & my hell.

Osahon Oka is a Pushcart and Best of the net nominated poet hailing from Nigeria. He is the winner of the Brigitte Poirson Poetry Contest in June 2017 and a winner of the Visual Verse Autumn Writing Prize 2022. His poems have appeared in Libretto Magazine, Neocolonial passage, Icefloe Press, Crowstep and elsewhere. Twitter: @OsahonOka

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