These three poems by Tares Oburumu were especially chosen for The Bala Selection.
The Bala Selection is a bi-weekly poetry feature curated by Ismail Bala for Konya Shamsrumi, showcasing distinctive new voices and resonant works from across Africa and beyond. Through his discerning eye, each selection highlights the craft, music, and emotional clarity that define contemporary poetry in its most luminous form.
Ismail Bala is a poet, translator, and critic whose work bridges classical poetics and modern sensibility, and whose mentorship has shaped a generation of emerging African poets.
Miracle
Lights of the mourning fields, gathered
in their necessary lights hanging above
the slow town of White Aburdene, even in such
brightness, I did not see you coming.
Death in your right hand, life in the other,
you walk out of the bomb-bright places
into the page I keep opening to let you in.
Now sit, tell me, what’s half of a dream or
an unfinished flight?
A Requiem. A Jazz for the Herons
April comes, after the heat-storm, like a newborn
I have always wanted to weave my arms around. Tender.
Cornstalk-soft. Jazz, or water rooting what must not be
harvested, the notes are fine dust. Breathe now. I speak
to the green sun. There’s much to be done for a country,
as there’s for a baby. The time to plant heaven has not come
yet? Or perhaps, I should ask the Herons, dressed in white,
when will the kingdom come? T.S Eliot and Derek Walcott
are busy with what define them, a pack of cigarettes and
a tower from which they burn pure incense, looking lost
at how the flowers bring the bees to the town of Rann. A feast
of lancets, the venom pumps through the blood of histories
and the government of the dead, by the dead, for the dead.
It’s a still year but I am not dying today, not even the thousand
goons to come next, there’s the poetry of what saves me, and exile,
so sweet. Lights of lines become routes, such ecstatic logic. I know
what to do with my heart when it’s open. I turn it into a cloud and watch from
the pinnacle the every day funerals spreading. Those who are about
to set fire to the hives, those who are about to fall in love, the wrong
roses, the written texts like fields in tears, Lord, have mercy on us.
Forever Song
We walk past his grave under the ground,
my long unhappy hands in my pockets,
something is squeezed between my fingers,
a small photograph of us when we
were much younger, all smiles at the cliff we are
made to fall off, he, always the last to take
a step further, the first to arrive at the gates which
lead to temptation; the Nigerian Psychosis.
About Tares Oburumu
Tares Oburumu is a poet, essayist and playwright. He’s the 2022 winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry. GAP Poetry Prize winner and two-time Pushcart nominee.
