Christological Biafran warrior
sidestepping bowdlerised limbs
Where’s praise-song in carnage?
Rebels’ sprayed blood his ‘ambience’
Ploughshares beaten into machetes
scramble for a martyr’s typology
Censers smoke their oblations
scarred prophet-tongue enunciates
what those locusts have devoured
Haemoglobin’s tide of lunar fluency
Idoto’s chanson de geste troubadour
inexorable witness in medias res
nuanced fabulist attuned to atone
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Accidentally the martyr
etymologically Christ’s bearer
A poet by happenstance
whose eye for sonic detail
is his antenna’s blade
Not a bystander more
a bulwark an inbetweener
who happened to be Makar
Intervention does not necessarily
in that enervated nation
during that entropic epoch
Canicular colonial snarling
hegemony’s faceted gryphon
hogging the harvest
despoiling spoils
Yet to be man enough
to withstand is to breathe
be amorous with Agape
These are his indefatigable traits
To witness unto death herself
(Christopher Okigbo – 1932-67;
Nigerian poet killed in the Biafran War)
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