A poet who named sky ‘bracelet’
A poet who named moon ‘rainbow dust’
A poet who made a web of clouds with the naked ankles of lust
A poet who cast a silhouette of almond blossoms on the sun
(where are The Quatrains? were they smashed by the hammer of dreams? – Book of Dreams)
First Quatrain
(*)
what is the angle of doubt, what is sky bracelet, what is almond blossoms, what is image, what is tree of dreams, what is sight, what is absurd breath, what is breast dangling over the nose of cloud, what is angst, what is lust circling over the curvature of flesh
(Hunter enters the forest of blue, hunter walks upon the floating carpet in the forest of blue)
what is breast dripping juice of fear & chilli of loss, what is crown, what is golden cavity on the edge of crown, what is silk, what is bulbous eye of the cursed whore of Aragon, what is montage, what is flash, what is reel, what is light lighting light on the lanterns of light, what is parapet, what is tomb
(John Berger drops a twig on a parapet in a cemetery in Ramallah, he paints a mural depicting the absent presence of a tomb, on the tombstone he scrawls: Me and you are two Sufis on the path to God, both of us blind)*
what is blind, what is dervish whirling in the circle of ice, what is pain in the shattered scapula of the Baobab tree, what is truth in the barrel of gun yielding painters of grief, what is elephant’s head moving through a caterpillar of rest, what is value of desire from the chronicles of Aragon, what is space trigger in fatasmatic vision of principles & coherence in the eye of the praying mantis, what is word image, what is box language, what is convulsed laughter in the language of dreams, what is liquid dream in the brown black rock on the surface of speech, what is stutter, what is poet stuttering about a tea cup a table a casket of lies
(Wittgenstein in a trench, hands on the trigger, eyes on a one eyed soldier charging forward with a smiling bayonet, head in the clouds, brain on haemorrhage: Language is an attempt to use a rake to paint a grotesque image of an ostrich floating on the missing canvas of night)
what is Z in Zip on the helm of a glass window made with ash, what is dance of tango with the wind, what is a sea of sleeping Hesler, what is automatic writing about a porcelain Bull in a China shop, what is garden of breasts in the house of bones, what is breast covering sky quakes & male tremors in sea of tears, what is stone, what is time’s intractable finger, what is light of unreason on the evening of thought, what is poetics of lame logic, what is thorn, what is lament of the flame, what is bracelet, what is sky, what is almond blossoms of grey, what is web of cloud in the rainbow of sky, what is sky
Last Quatrain
(*)
I am Abu Nuwas, the lute player who folded the breast of the moon
I am a butterfly in a tavern where – I am tavern, I am wine
I am beads of stone dangling on the plump buttocks of Layla
I am knife of desire; I am fountain of bliss
(The blind master said, poetry is the articulation of lust, therefore Okigbo’s summation: And I say Logistics, which is what poetry is is a fallacy)
What is lust
* Quoted from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem Mural.
Umar Abubakar Sidi is a helicopter pilot with the Nigerian Navy. He is the author of Striking the Strings, the poetry chapbook The Poet of Sand (Saraba) and the poetry collection The Poet of Dust (Konya Shamsrumi). His work has appeared in Praxis Magazine Online, Brittle Paper, Transition Magazine, and elsewhere.
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