Poetic Thoughts
Chidi Anthony Opara
Chidi Anthony Opara
Chidi Anthony Opara
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Cornelius Hamelberg
O Chidi !
We ask, how many more shuffling feet O Lord, from nowhere to nowhere? Shuffling, shuffering and shmiling...
I imagine you - like sardines in a bombay tata bus , you against your will all the way from Owerri to Lagos being squeezed in by two parrots. Male and female created He them.
I have suffered some of the same, poorly travelling by tro-tro and danfo, Accra - Kumasi, Buguma- Umuahia, especially when sometimes, the parrots are not female but male and of the Jehovah's witness tribe or some pentecostal evangelists whose main mission in life is to convert you to their own way of life, the truth, the bread, their first question: Have you been saved? Saved by whom? Buhari? Kanu?
But most of them won’t have to wait too long :As Jesus preached to his people of Biafra : Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven !
That’s the golden word, slum that which the REv. Bob Marley used to refer to as the Ghetto - and down there in the Ghetto - we suffer
In Africa, the only ghetto I know - knew and very well, was Nima in Accra where I had some Fra-Fra friends from Bolgatanga ( Dollar and Attah the caretakers in the South Legon Chalets) who had a few friends and relatives in the Police force - and at weddings, outdoorings, promotions, etc a lot of peace and love , music and dancing and that Fra fra violin the gongi would play on, endlessly…
About real pet parrots who may be ownerless before they too return to heaven : https://the-oasis.org/
Chidi Anthony Opara
The character in the poem said that;
The bus moves like snail.
This "go slow"!"
CAO.
Cornelius Hamelberg
Chidi,
Your poems and poetic thoughts often give or leave a lot of latitude for interpretation.
For some time now I have been following you closer than any other poet. At least I read everything that you post in this forum. I understood the “go slow” to be one of the infernal, legendary traffic jams said to occur only in Lagos, to the extent that to be out in traffic, cars had to alternate between odd and even numbers on their number plates, on any given day. By the way, I have never been to Lagos; I phoned Dele Okonkwo ( a saxophonist with Fela) at Surulere Night Club in Lagos, when I had just arrived in Nigeria but I finally decided to stay put in Port Harcourt.
Dear Dele passed away after an asthma attack, alone and in his apartment, just a few days after I last met him in Stockholm...
Damn this traffic jam
By the way, I like your poem which I interpret to be a reflection on South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma currently strapped by almost 800 corruption charges waiting to be heard in a court of law , not paying a courtesy call on anti-corruption President Buhari, but to your governor in Owerri where one of his statues has been erected, a statue of him in Bronze, I guess the Owerri version of the famous Benin Bronzes. For posterity’s sake should we hope that Zuma’s bronze statue doesn’t wind up in the British museum?
Chidi Anthony Opara
Cornelius Hamelberg
Chidi,
Quite a thoughtful, poetic reprimand.
I salute your bravery !
In the wake of Don Kperogi’s latest, I take it as for granted - perhaps a wild and sinful guess
that “The Saint” in question is none other than our own Brer Buhari ?
My guess is premised on the poetic intuition - having kept your company for so long in this forum, that you do not roam far away from home - (Lagos the big city is not so far from Owerri) and moreover hagiography is OK although I’ve developed some reservations about demonology ever since my Sufi Sheikh ( Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh) showed me the face of the one that I hated most - I had always thought that it was Mr. HItler but when I looked into the mirror all I saw staring back at me was the devil : Saddam Hussein : and then , sometime later I understood that that’s what could happen when you have an Iranian Pir or when for a couple of years you only read Tehran Times and Kayhan demonization of Saddam during the later part of the Iraq-Iran War. For Biafrans the archdemon would probably be somebody else. ( I still fault your idol Achebe for denying AWO the right to a national funeral on the grounds that - his words, on the grounds that AWO “ was not an Igbo God”
It’s no consolation either , that there’s a little bit of everybody in me and in you, even if the quality/ level of anger is not the same in everybody...
Anyway, back to reality, back from that post-hypnotic suggestion. Please bear in mind that theologically speaking, even given the heavenly hierarchies - check out the first elegy ( from Rilke’s Duino Elegies - ( in 1970 fortuitously handed over to me by African-American Brother George Crowell, then studying dance at the Insts. of African Studies in Ghana) the hierarchies , bear in mind, the universes and inuit how important you are :
God,
His archangel,
His angels,
His planets,
His galaxies,
His universes etc etc and down here on planet earth ,the humble saints from “humus” usually do not have “subordinates “ since in their own eyes they are lower than the dust and heaven is up above. But to the question :
Is this your subtle way of cautioning the saint about ignoring “the sins of subordinates”?
And please take note : There is a also subtle difference between
The other Saint cautioning us ( you and yours truly included) about insulting others
and
The other Saint cautioning us ( you and yours truly included) for insulting others
Or do you want me to translate the above into pidgin Igbo ( your mother tongue) ?
Last question : Do you Chidi, know the difference between God and a saint?
Well, this is originally in holy Arabic and is known as Ayatul kursi - the heart of the Quran / the throne verse : 2.255)).Pickthall’s translation
“ Allah! There is no God save Him, the Alive, the Eternal. Neither slumber nor sleep overtaketh Him. Unto Him belongeth whatsoever is in the heavens and whatsoever is in the earth. Who is he that intercedeth with Him save by His leave ? He knoweth that which is in front of them and that which is behind them, while they encompass nothing of His knowledge save what He will. His throne includeth the heavens and the earth, and He is never weary of preserving them. He is the Sublime, the Tremendous.”
This verse belongs to the top of the page....