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"I UNDERSTAND" . ABOUT ME POEM.."NEGRO" and TRYING TO MAKE THE MOST OF IT  IN NIGERIA

FESTIVITY IN BLACK

Portrait of a poet

An accomplice of time

My life is not a poem

An image of expense

Though I have made it all that

By origin

I am nothing but a -

By roots

Priesthood of perpetual change

In spirit and blood

Haunting the music of the mind

Stood with folded arms

Stretched through time

Heritage of thought

In a Nigerian village tribe

To embrace my root

Virgin mind like untapped dew

Choosing to be a Negro

Head above a sea of galvanized roof

With a rudderless canoe

Brooding a kernel of for breakfast

I go at the drift of my dream

Till his mind becomes a body

A man the color of night

Through the door of past memories

And re celebrate ebony

Passing through space

As I essay it all

And make the drum beat again once more

The bitter dreams of boundaries

Immersed in the act of ones art

Discover its point in my poems

To recreate the rhythms of our ancient past

Through me the past stands

I trove to seize the inmost form

What was old was new

Searching past what we see and hear

And what was new also came to stay

Toward the eternal Zulu dream

Through every beaten way

The clay tune

Some rags complete the picture of the artist

Landmark of my being

On post white fearlessness of our present

An interchange in time to present and past

Trying to make the art real

Spell out my poems

Among the cocoa groves

In a tribe in Edo state

THE BIRTH OF A DIVINER

A hen crowed when I was born

As wanderers never saw

WHEN I WAS A CHILD (on my deafness)

And the witch doctor confirmed my identity

I was circumcised with owl talons

I played by myself

And had every amen in a calabash brew

In a silence with many voices

All seven cowries facing north

All alone

Putting the doubt to rest

I hated the silence within

I wore rags tailored from animal skins

The difference it made of me

An exotic bird from outer space

And journeyed around from shrine to shrine

With silence as my gaze

To see the words to give way to other worlds

The native doctor handed me a talisman

A thousand sight and sound

Of deep I hardly know

Made from ancient forge

I hated the quiet of it all

The diviners brought me a virgin older than I

I was six or seven then

To make me a man

And my front teeth were missing

Before the appointed time

I proved my mettle

If anyone comes asking of me

With a penis that yet had no sperm

They would make the silence scream

As I walk naked down the streets

Talking with finger prints

My manhood scared off the witches

As each hand rise above ones head

The women in the tribe danced naked like the juju priest

Folks seems to go wild trying to make me hear

They pointed me the act, with thumb-sized nipples

With the language of signs

And shook their  to my ancient dirge

My dad's herds once gentle and tame

Poet on a shrine

Put forth a threatening horn

Gone wild when am near

Inspired by legends of the shrine

They flee from me

And the hen clucks away

To the gods of the shrine

When I too try to talk with fingerprint

I offer blood sacrifice on the shrine

And here I am

The patron of finger art

To make the shrine my own

Making the silence scream

Bruised my feet on the head stone

Imagine

POEMS BY URDEEN.OMOSUN all rights reserved 2003

To study the art of the shrine

To make me the act of the shrine

Before I touch the forbidden things of the shrine

To appease the temper of the gods of the shrine

Least they strike the poet on the shrine

Before the appointed time

RETURN OF THE NATIVE

With the art of my poems

I am not shall what I pretended

Or what I intended to accomplish

As I shook of my pant in the native tribe

And bared my manhood to all

To make the act the art

I try to invoke my past that haunts my dreams

And blind myself to the modems world

That the art may creep and grow it act

I tiptoed through the part my fathers once trodden

And looked through the peephole for fresh insight

And dream of a different word to change my world

Rooted in the genes of a true nomad

Naked in a passionate moment,

To haunts the faith that bounds me

The spirit moves me to the market square

As I essay my find

To amuse visitors in the Internet

I chant incarnation to write this poem

Selected words within the ancient tribe

Notes beyond the modern world

Looking for forms which art says must act

Things of past which I most know

Strike me a note equal to ones mind

Fill the modern world with ancient dirge

Lest they discovers the oddity on me

I bare my fag

And perform rituals

Through the pillars I called teeth

And my spirit rose

I was no longer the act

I was the art

The offerings lifted me

The sacrifices healed me

The idols made it all real

To make the gods content

To heal the art

With a thousand offerings

I kept the art alive

At every rite the past cease to be past

And renew the art once forgotten act

And bring the years closer to a forgotten lot

I am, right now trying to live

As my forefathers lives

I thought as warriors of old

The savagery of it all made manifest

As a black American dance a native dirge

THE ART OF A NATIVE

What I have always wanted to do

Was what I hadn't done before-

I try to bring our culture back to bear

Century older than Christ

To retrace my steps,

I shook of my clothes and clothed myself with the native beads

I try to act the way the tribesman act

Moves to the forest with machete in hand

Seeking for leaves with which to wipe off the lie

The talons of an owl to invoke the night gods

As I conjure up my root and see myself in it

I bought a spot on a leopard coat

A mirror that shows more than what faces it

Made a dance in the shadow of the moon

To prove my mettle as a real witch doctor

tAm so good at being what I am

Am so good at doing what I do

It didnt matter that all I do were acted out

But suppose art cease to become art

And becomes real

What if act cease to be act and becomes real?

In my vein runs the blood of my past

Hatched out as miracles with an ancient spare

A talisman tied on my left arm was as old as time

SUDDENLY

As I chat incarnations

To make the act the art

The diviners of old cease to become act through me

And becomes real

BLACK POET -INDUCED VISIONS

In my youth the city has no place

To make me see the way my forefather saw

My ideals were textbooks imagination

From black poet -induced visions

But here- the incarnation is working on me

With demons and saints

The spirit moves me in the direction of a dance

The act of every art, in my native tribe

Dancing in the moonlight

with the intimation of a priest

Shaking my yansh like grandpa mating dance

CONTENT OF MY SHRINE

Empty pods on a shrine

Used to invoke the gods

As the juju man recite incantations

To god of the green

Shell of a turtle

Preserve the heritage in the shrine

In the characteristic of modern time

To make it all seem real

A calabash on a shrine

Seven cowries within it fray

Is like opening a book

To study prints that lay within

A spare on a shrine

Is like being enclosed in a space

Knowing that you were being protected

By thing you couldn't see

Is for a god designed

Sustaining a miracle of self belief

With an oath of abracadabra

Dead things on the shrine

To breathe life into dead space

For the Resurrection of the dead

That is dead to the church

Insect pinned on walls

Are not really a native craft?

But the art of our ancestress

The tribal passion inspired me

Skull of a vulture

To listen to the voice within

As I call on you with a pagan tongue

Here I invoke the spirit

The oracle on a shrine

When I was but a child