Olayimika

Song of a first born daughter to the beats of gangan.

I am the first fruit of your loins.
Seasoned with grace.
Seasoned with salt.
I stride to drumbeats.
Flywhisks attend my hands.
Like anklets of brass, joy encircles.

I am the consolation,
born for the day of affliction.
I am the vigour,
the virgin seed,
roosting under coverlets of aso-oke.

Down the winding road, I nurture the handkerchiefs
for champions who cry…
Behold the daughter,
your blessed harvest.
Your basket of plump yams.
Your scented one.

Toyin Adewale-Gabriel

Friday Night Live

Our dreams are hindsights
travelling to the people under the earth
journeying down the cities
filling the centuries with sons
so fat they can’t pass the needle’s eye

Only the ointment keeps faith
in the hands of a daughter
preparing you for burial
the unleavened bread
calls forth mourners

And prostitutes eating bread
with hallowed hands.
Henna mingles with hungers
at the eleventh hour when
rejected pebbles fall like death
sentences on brown earth

This wine sets my eyes on edge
to stilled waters on barren hillsides
this wine red in the cup
the scarlet thread
the broken donkey
Linen breeches dyed in crimson.

The air is rich in prophecies and revolutions
within the olive tree
a copulation is a flame
burning the bush full of grass windows
the light shimmers upon the waters

Light is a quiver of arrows
Light is an earthquake
Light is a stormy wind
Light is a great cry
electric on bones and skulls

The bones are diving for flesh
The shrouds are dying in the stars
There is light in our loins.

Toyin Adewale-Gabriel

Response

(This poem is a reaction to Elena Carmagani’s exibition “Machina Anamnesica at Akademie Schloss Solitude. My take-off point: Anamnesis- to study the memory of a place through its relationship to time.)

Who will open the vault of trophies,
when elephants vanish like dust in a vacuum cleaner
Who will tell the drama of open air theatres.
Who will travel the labyrinths, seeking the
mushrooms in lost Chinese gardens?

Who can climb the tree branches,
to the castle where you can never arrive.
Who can trek the sixty straight miles to solitude,
traversing the thread-thin lanes between hope and despair?

Remember the relics of ice, the voice
of the forest, how bare, groaning in winter.
Remember the spring of black squirrels, truly naughty,
mightily triumphant. Remember the summer of
fluxus, of drunken honey bees, a surprise telephone call
from California. Remember the abundant wind
and red and gold, the nostalgia of autumn.

Toyin Adewale-Gabriel

Listen To Yourself

(In memory of Durban)

Where is a word to hold the edge of blue waters
when the waves wrestle
like rival wives?

Where is a word to hold a woman
when she runs, runs, runs …

Where is a word to stamp out a fire
when a sky has no
home?

Listen to yourself.
Listen to the gossip of seas,
washing up Nombolisa’s cooking stones.
Listen to derelict hope swinging cloth hangers at the green lights.
Listen to the man you cannot touch
the manacled children, the rubbished innocence.

Toyin Adewale-Gabriel

Safari

(for Ogaga Ifowodo)

When I read my poems,
dripping with fire and sewers,
they asked me, ‘Don’t you write
about trees and constellations?’

And I said, in this land we love with pain
until the mane looks like whips.
I can’t pretend that the blood in
my mouth is tomato sauce.

Your book grieves on my table.
The jokes at our lunch became rancid.
What a sacrifice we endure,
bricks on worn heads.
Loads that grow abundantly.

Through the dust, I look for your scent,
your safari heart, that curious joy
that irrigates your poetry,
I see bones sold in bank accounts,
a deposit, waiting for barbarians.

That is why the wind spreads your words,
of wasps, of networks, of groans.

Toyin Adewale-Gabriel

Explorer Of Aromas

As the fire devours the grass,
as flames consume the matchsticks,

the street swallows my steps,
my voice dissolves in soil.

I know the green bile of hunger.
I know the triumph of dust,

the sneering arrogance of the sun,
on the carcasses of sodden

rats. l have dined on dried dogs,
flavoured with acrid urine.

And at the feet of elaborate remnants,
I find the most high remains,

Of chicken thighs unloved by excess.
I, the explorer of aromas,

wading through the maze of rice,
delighting in trash. l say your refuse

can is finger-licking good.
They say the rich also cry,

dancing to soothe their shame,
their throbbing sores.

Toyin Adewale-Gabriel

After Song

Today, I roar like a loose lion
hungry to prowl the morning kilometres of sundawn
but steel clangs in;
bars me, binds me, unbinds me.
You are the restraint
The crucial divorce from leaden chains
The narrow path that urgently commands my presence.
You are the challenge that won’t let me grieve
Today, you are a cage, my great freedom.

Toyin Adewale-Gabriel

A Poster

Within you
Verdant hills tease a thunderous waterfall beneath the canopy
of a potent sky.
A sun, the shade of mischief
Pours a warm morning on steep mountain paths –
Dare I climb?
To the heady songs
Of a different thousand birds, a thousand different leaves to
hug peace words
whose lips root soul-deep
at the querulous waters
where there’s full fruit.

Toyin Adewale-Gabriel