Uche Ogbuji, more properly Úchèńnà Ogbújí, was born in Calabar, Nigeria. He lived in Egypt, England and elsewhere before settling near Boulder, Colorado. A computer engineer and entrepreneur by trade, his poetry chapbook, Ndewo, Colorado (Aldrich Press) is a Colorado Book Award Winner, and a Westword Award Winner (“Best Environmental Poetry”). His poems, published worldwide, fuse Igbo culture, European classicism, American Mountain West setting, and Hip-Hop. He co-hosts the Poetry Voice podcast, featured in the Best New African Poets anthology, and was shortlisted for Nigeria’s Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize.
Bey Machemba to the Germans
Southern Tanganyika, 1890. During the infamous Scramble for Africa, King Machemba of the Yao people defied the authority of the Germans over East Africa, avoiding defeat for 9 years. He wrote a famous letter in Kiswahili to Major Hermann von Wissmann, expressing a sentiment that resonates with many Africans even today.
Who should obey whom in their sovereign land?
I’ve listened the course of your haughty say,
Such arrogance I can barely withstand!
I see no reason you should have your way.
Here’s no Bohemia, your stronghold for sway;
It’s strange you think me subject to remand;
I’m sultan here in Yao! I’m king! I’m Bey!
Who should obey whom in their sovereign land?
Were it the course of friendship you had planned,
Ever I’d be open, still yet today,
But far from the courtesy I understand,
I’ve listened the course of your haughty say.
Allah’s creatures all, his to command;
For him alone I kneel, and then to pray.
Where is your shame whose uttered words betray
Such arrogance I can barely withstand?
It’s fair the tax within my royal rand
And yet you’ve never brought yourself to pay;
We’ve no relations on which you can stand:
I see no reason you should have your way.
Is this the European idea of grand?
Perhaps you’ll salt this answer with dismay.
But you’ll have to reach in with your own hand
If you think your force can rule the day.
Who should obey?
Hanger
Thought I was going…
“Not to be:” that’s the question,
Unstill, unanswered.
My swerve leaves me in between
Sea and rock, tripped the cliff’s edge…
First published in Verse Virtual, 2016
Pourallé Lieu
North Africa through Europe and The States,
Then back in staged sweep across Nigeria,
My parents whisked me wending on their rounds;
These stations flash by, marking my worldly
Claim over mythic forests of ancestry,
The passport stomped with harrow marks aground.
The child to recall, the people to forget
Is this new ritual of beating at bounds.
There’re some pains condign of normal passage,
A parish boy’s agons on worldly show,
On which the village annals redound.
Like ghosting on old tape, these scenes, embellished
With border-post whippings, and trophy
Scrapes from being dragged pell-mell by frenzied hounds.
The child to recall, the people to forget
Is this new ritual of beating at bounds.
Pushing towards the surface a dark Oceanus
Cuts into sylvan tell-tale and enchantment
With swift, muddled water that surrounds
The earths of my spirit trove, modulating
The blood carrier signal of my words with
Input of far-flung tastes and sights and sounds.
The child to recall, the people to forget
Is this new ritual of beating at bounds.
First published in Forage Poetry, 2016
Carotid
Soft Rhythm
Through your neck’s long-bone arc,
Down radius after clavicle,
Through your warm fingertips
Through my hair’s trip-roots—
You play knock-occiput
To splay of muscles
At my unguarded nape.
Soft Rhythm
Marks hard into time;
That frisson you’ve made,
Screws thrill
From my sacrum
To rattle my
Medulla from its balance.
Attentive, I chew each clump of bidden words
To drop nonsense in your lap.
The right silence
After long speech
Trips mirthful eyes to coy embrace;
You drawl that smile
With slothful impulse
And there’s antigravity
To your moistening eyelids.
I scan quickly
From your ear’s knot under hair
To the moment’s throbbing center,
The tilting thumb-drum
At your throat,
Keeping time,
Keeping time
As your face beckons
Towards your heart’s shallow rock.
First published in KAIROS, 2016
Parachuted
Colorado National Monument, Fruita
It beats attention from our toes
At first, this sparse, grangy gaggle
Of bull rocks verged about the calfs
Who know the urged edge but straggle
Stoic along the perch until fate
Makes good on cracked calamity,
Maturing them in snap-shutter plunge;
They settle, grey salting on scree.
Just as the prankster juniper
Chuckles at her root’s sly doing
The ranger’s voice snaps me about
From open-mouthed cross-canyon viewing.
“This is Kayenta, foot-loose hold
For roots, and swift life’s flash pools.”
It seemed the sky dashed rocks down in
Some rage from which it still slow-cools.
Were they storm paratroop assault
Huddling where their brief blanked its lies?
Looking for the native red that
Washed from their fancy of disguise?
No, said ranger, these are slow wave
Reformed in trough of the Triassic;
Long before this REM age they slept
Deeply here, bowstrung, elastic.
How does this land mean me, hurled down
From across Pangea’s old never?
Had I no pushy, sub rosa
Roots for space and time to sever?
I step assured on brother stone,
Such camp mates with whom I’ve slumbered;
What juju I spell awakens here,
Those generations unencumbered.
from Ndewo, Colorado, Aldrich Press, 2013
