WINDOW SWIMMING IN ACCRA
Abandoned to cleaners
At the break of dawn
Your oval serenity rests tranquil
Resplendent in the deep blue hue
Of your crystalline-clear depths,
Bare and bereft of swimmers –
Like hair on pubescent pubis…
(when the pool is clean
even the stone hungers
a tempestuous dive,
like the countryside lame a walk
on nights when the moon
out of her monthly hibernation
sweeps the playgrounds clean
with God’s incandescent brooms
borrowed from the distant sun)
Come the sun in time
They come trooping out in song
Sprouting in figures and numbers
Saints white, yellow, red but black
To bath, splash, romance and canoodle
Where the locals cannot afford to drift –
Like hair on hirsute adult pudenda.
*Golden Tulip Hotel Accra 06/06/06
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RAINWATCH IN UTE
I
Cats and dogs on the roof
Render conversation inaudible
Duologue implausible
Dialogue intractable
Monologue impossible
Till soliloquy
Roused mid-siesta
Afore dénouement
Of forlorn dream
Posts nagging wish
On either lip o’mine:
Falling rain, falling rain
Suffer me next
En route my lover’s lair
That I may better savour
These invigorating thumps
Of ambidextrous drumbeats!
II
Arrows off heaven’s interminable bow
Shower in slanting multitudes
Hardly filling to the hilt
Vats left out in the open
To collect them pure and chaste;
But pour down in rivulets
No sooner it lost its virginity
On rusty corrugated rooftops
Till its cyclical thunderclap
Tails another lightening flash
And a question bonds in kowtow:
Fallen rain, fallen rain
What laconic lesson
Deeper than meets the eye
Lurks for one and all
In this potent disparity
Of thy either state?
*Ute-Okpu, Bendel State 18/05/85
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(c) Isidore Emeka Uzoatu