Read the Analysis of this Poem
...and After
He comes,who scrapes no earthdung from his feet
He comes again in Harvest,the first of reapers
Night is our tryst when sounds are clear
And silences ring pure tones as the pause
Of iron bells
At pilgrims'rest beneath ldanre Hill
The wine-girl,dazed from divine dallying
Felt wine-skeins race in fire-patterns within her
Her eyes queried,what then are you?At such hour Why seek what on the hills:
And she swam an eel into the shadows,felt her limbs
Grow live,the torrents ran within and fHooded us A gourd rose and danced between -without
The night awaited celebration of the crops - She took,and held it to her womb.
Calm,beyond interpreting,she sat and in her grace Shared wine with us.The quiet of the night
Shawled us together,secure she was in knowledge Of that night's benediction.Ogun smiled his peace Upon her,and we rose
The sky cracked halfways,a greying skull
On blooded highways.I turned,vapours rose From sodden bitumen and snaked within
Her wrap of indigo,her navel misted over A sloe bared from the fruit
Darkness veiled her little hills poised
Twin nights against the night,pensive points In the leer of lightning,and sadness filled
The lone face of the wine-girl;the thatch
Ran rivulets between her breasts.
Harvest night,and time to walk with fruit
Between your lips,on psalming feet.We walked
Silently across a haze of corn,and Ogun
Teased his ears with tassels,his footprints
Future furrows for the giant root
His hcad was lost among palm towers
And power pylons.Through acons of darkncss rode the stone
Of whirling incandescence,and cables danced
In writhing ecstasies,point to point,wart to wart
Of electric coils
The unit kcrncl atomised,presaging new cohesions Forms at metagenesis.Ogun lay on tension wires Slung in hammock,sail-wing birds of night
Nested in his armpits,through pylon rungs few
Braids of veins,nerved wings and sonic waves
In the blasting of the seed,in the night-birds'
Instant discernment,in the elemental fusion,sced
To current,shone the godhead essence;
One speeds his captive bolts on filaments
Spun of another's forge.And we
Have honeycombed beneath his hills,worked red earth Of encrgies,quarrying rare and urgent ores and paid
With wrecks of last year's suppers,paved his roads
With shells,milestones of breathless bones-
Ogun is a demanding god.
We walked through broken braids of steel
And fallen acrobats.The endless safety ncts
Of forests prove a green deception
Fated lives ride on the wheels of death when,
The road waits,famished
Cave and castle,shrine and ghostly grottos
Playthings now of children,shades
For browsing goats.The wheels have fallen
To looters and insurance men,litigant on
Spare part sales and terms of premium
The weeds grow sinuous through gaunt corrosions
Skeletons of speed,earth mounds raised towards
Their secming exhumation;growth is grecner where Rich blood has spilt;brain and marrow make
Fat manure with sheep's excrement
As the First Boulder,as the errant wheel
Of the death chariot,as the creation snake
Spawned tail in mouth,wind chisels and rain pastes Rust from steel and bones,wake dormant seeds
And suspended lives.I heard
The silence yield to substance.They rose,
The dead whom fruit and oil await
On doorstep shrine and road,their lips
Moist from the first flakes of harvest rain -
Even gods remember dues.
Ogun,godfather of all souls who by road
Made the voyage home,made his being welcome Suffused in new powers of night,my skin
Grew light with eyes;I watched them drift away
To join the gathering presences
Tomorrow they preside,guests unseen
To whom the rams will bow,and with open throats
Quench totemic thirsts,thirst of earth
The hems of hidden voices brush all fect
This night,dew-wet with departed breaths
And to the one whose feet were wreathed In dark vapours from earth's cooling pitch
I earth my being,she who has felt rain's probing Vines on night's lamp-post,priestess at fresh shrines Sacred leaf whose hollow gathers rains
Vast grows the counterpane of nights since innocence Of apocalyptic skies,when thunderous shiclds clashed Across the heights,when bulls leapt cloud humps and Thunders opened chasms end to end of fire:
The sky a slate of scoured lettering
Of widening wounds eclipsed in smoke,scabbed
From a pale cauterising hand to a jewelled crucifix Seared in agonic purities.And except
A certain knowledge named it the apocalypse,it stayed Portents in unquiet nights
Where sprang armoured beasts,unidentifiable, Nozzles of fames,tails of restive gristles
Banncrs of saints,cavalcades of awesome host Festival of firevales,crush of starlode
And exploding planets
Whorls of intemperate steel,triangles of cabal
In rabid spheres,iron bellows at volcanic tunnels Easters in convulsions,urged by energies
Of light millenniums,crusades,empires and revolution Damnations and savage salvations
Later,diminutive zcbras raced on track edges Round the bed,dwarfs blew on royal bugles A gaunt ogboni raised his staff and vaulted on A zebra's back,galloped up a quivering nose - A battle with the suffocating shrouds
Opalescent pythons oozed tar coils
Hung from rafters thrashing loops of gelatine
The world was choked in wet embrace
Of serpent spawn,waiting Ajantala's rebel birth Monster child,wrestling pachyderms of myth,
And at the haven ofa distant square
Of light,hope's sliver from vile entombment
She waited,caryatid at the door of sanctuary
Her hands were groves ofpeace,Oya's forehead Dipped to pools and still hypnotic springs
And now she is a dark sheath freed
From Ogun's sword,her head of tapered plaits
A casque of iron filigree,a strength
Among sweet reeds and lemon bushes,palm And fragrances of rain
The night glowed violet about his head
He reached a large hand to tension wires
And plucked a string;earth was a surreal bowl
Ofsounds and mystic timbres,his fingers
Drew warring elements to a union of being
And taught the veins to dance,of earth of rock
Of tree,sky,of fire and rain,of Hesh of man
And woman.Ogun is the god that ventures first
His path one loop of time,one iron coil
Earth's broken rings were healed
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