THE BABISHAI POETRY 2015 SHORTLIST IS HERE!
THE WINNER WILL BE ANNOUNCED DURING THE BABISHAI POETRY FESTIVAL, 26 TO 28 AUGUST AT THE UGANDA MUSEUM IN KAMPALA.
WE’LL ALSO BE LAUNCHING POETRY ON THE MOUNTAIN AND BODA BODA ANTHEM AND OTHER POEMS.
#BABISHAI2015
Like Scented Mangoes by Arinze Ifeakandu (Nigeria)
I used to like the quiet in this place
Both of us
Seated under the mango tree
Sipping our tea in paper cups
Mum used to come and check on us
—Don’t climb up the mango tree, she said
But after she left you sprinted up
Agile as a monkey
And climbed branch after branch
The sunlight bathing you in the finest gold
And between us the scent of rotting mangoes
I was the fearful little one
Who watched with longing from below
As, balanced on a sturdy branch, you stared down at me
And smiled—You see? You see?
And then, clambering down, we stood side by side
Watching the sunset turn all bloody red
We have grown up too quickly
And I have traveled the world
Tokyo, Japan
Accra, Ghana
America, Everywhere
I have returned to this place
Where the silence now gnaws like rats’ teeth
Gentle-gentle, coolly-coolly
Between us, distance like scented mangoes
Mum’s grave white and marble
Behind the shrubs
Where once we lay side by side
And tasted the fading tea on each other’s tongue
Hands lingering at certain places
Your breath on my neck like warm-water air—
In Memory of a Loving Mother
—Memory like a frozen smile on a fading picture
Like childhood music at Sunday School
La lala
I look up and the flowers are budding between green leafs
Two paper cups lie buried in sand and twigs
I squat to pick them up
But I pick only dust.
****************************************************************
My Son by Adhiambo Agoro (Kenya)
Fruit of my womb
I beg to stay away
And let you build bridges
To carve sculptures of our souls
To read invisible lines of Holy books
To find meaning in meaningless lines
And hope from tombs left for so long
Mother will be back
Let me find one like us, for us to become one
As your spine gives your body posture
So does the rhythm of our blood play upright music?
You are my last winter bird
My twins gave hope
My smile gave pride
But we're little termites with big hearts
We need our scraggy feet for paths we haven't crossed
Let me find one like us, for us to become one
The roses of our hearts have a charity case
The sidelines of our thoughts need ironing
We consume a variety of edibles to keep ourselves strong
It is a hard claim to live up to, Son
I recall your baby steps
And maps you left on the seabed after a longer drought.
Our change is forbidden but still
Let me find one like us, for us to become one
I will write these lines on paper
For the crowd to listen to our acapella
My name was lonely
Your father's name was pain
We covered your eyes from the world
For us to clean the dirt under our nails
Your life is a yearned cliché
I cry
Let me find one like us, for us to become one
We have few pieces of joy
Will we suffocate on these solitary streets?
No Son. We need history and tales
For kisses woke up the Queens and portions made Kingdoms sleep
Hold my hand to seal these words
Feel the scent from unseen paradises
As we beseech the mercies of prayer and faith
Let me find one like us, for us to become one.
*********************************************************************
A ROOM WITH A DROWNING BOOK by Adeeko Ibukun (Nigeria)
Somewhere in the room a book is drowning, the floor
is shivering with pages. You said the spine is the balance
to our two winged hearts. Sometimes it’s the light knitting
its letters to our hearts. I see how things hold us in their lights
so we aren’t here or there like you’re here and somewhere
a lover holds you in her heart, light in water teaching these lessons.
Sometimes something holds clearly what we couldn’t say in words.
We face it to learn our silence and that again becomes part of
our languages. Places own us like this, light bounces off them,
turning their spears at me. Our hearts beat now and vision takes
its shapes—the stream of consciousness, nuances as water turn,
streamlet as novella lost in our undercurrent. I’m lost in a story now
or a story’s lost in me. Perhaps we should hang on words so that
we do not drown. Remembering makes living its anchor. So I asked
if it’s us you wanted to save insisting everything is placed this way
and that way of our anniversaries, each moment achieved as light
buried in water—so it’s here or there, past or present, our chairs and tables,
dresser and records becoming the dykes. The mirror’s at an angle
to the world so it does not yield all its light at once. Everything’s our
subject before we become their subject, relying on memories to endure.
The Ghost of Jevanjee by Nyanduaki Okongo Omare (Kenya)
You knew he would visit you,
sitting on the concrete bench, alone, pretending to be immersed in an old book
He greets your silence like an old friend
and stays there.
He will bother to describe the trees to you
each one of them
points at the shrubs by your feet and say- choose the one that speaks to you most and I'll give you its name.
The sun will burn your back for attention
the ants will pilgrimage up your skin like hungry hands
but you will do nothing about it.
He will tell you this- when the imminent rain comes, don't run away from it
allow it to wash your shadow clean
until it no longer darkens the ground above you.
And that even there,
in the midst of love oaths
buried earthworms
hands pressed together in worry
planned sabbaticals
eagles' droppings
'I am the bread of life' sermons
thieves with no faces
memories of sex
great jokes told with closed mouths
smooth stones and potted flowers.
Even there,
you will find two friends:
Wrath, which burns but is sweeter
and Mercy, which suffocates but is lighter.
Choose one,
and it will give you your name.
***********************************************************************
Luna by Danica Kreusch (South Africa)
Light spills into the stone basin
And collects itself into the moon
This is the place the birds bathe
Celebrating their freedom and purpose
And lifetime of trying to touch the sun
He has none of these three things
But he has her hand in his
Fingers knotted and not cupped
These long-dirtied palms
Submerge in the water
And for long moments they have created chaos
Then light collects itself over their linked hands
Luna
She feels like purpose and freedom and starlight
Enough, his heart finally sighs
No more striving. She is enough.
*********************************************************
JOURNEY INTO SONGS by Gbenga Adesina (Nigeria)
(On the Benin road)
i
The leaves are an imagination of green:
Self-preening Limbas, doting, motherly Guava trees unfurling their
arms on this road. The oaks and mahoganies loop like
map lines that lead to love.
And you, being you, find yourself in a state of desire
You want to touch and be touched. To fold yourself into a song, into a ballad
and give of it to this air. To re-listen to these places with new eyes, you
yielding to the road, the road yielding to you. Hugh Masekela cooing beside you;
the sheer thrush of self-surrender.
ii
But really, I’m thinking these greens, these twigs are opening sentences
I’m thinking, really, that roads are people and people are roads and
when we take them, navigate them, what we come into is a soft surprise
of songs. Some bright watermarks, some dark or maroon like love or loss
like these trees and their cheerful leaves beneath which there is a dying and a sighing
and a loving, like the red wound in Hugh’s voice as he twirls and twirls me into his space,
my hands trembling on the gear.
I press down on the pedal. Our car is a purr scissoring through the night.
iii
We are now at a junction where a slim, red-brown road on the left
slithers down the green into something we do not know
If I turn this wheel, careen down the road into its dusty insistence
Will I see her
My mother: a little Benin girl again making dreams in sand
or her father, Abulema, bare chested sculptor, his fingers
quick to love as to wood, nursing a bronze slap into a god
a waiting in his eyes, under this April sky relentlessly preaching
the gospel of rain.
**********************************************************************
WOMEN LOVERS by Salawu Olajide (Nigeria)
She first said her biology was failing, and then her look, then her smile, then her feeling, then her heart. We look at each other on the rocking chairs. Listen, she says. The tube of her mouth holds something venal and serious. We long for each other. Finally. The finally comes as if it is the only intended word in the middle of the phrasing. She has a way of meaning her adverb. Did you moan on each other’s thigh ‘cept for sex? She says nothing but a nod which means yes. The sun seems to be gossiping through the window, I unhinge the curtain and let darkness swallow us. There are things they must not know. I whisper some calmness into her heart. She adjusts her gown and shows the part of her breast where she last kissed her. It is as if I have never loved before.
LHR: by Nick Makoha (Uganda)
An airport is a room. I keep talking as if my body is elsewhere.
In full sight of a crimson God as children we were burdens,
coffins with eyes. A professor steps into the light to educate us.
You can't kill the dead twice. Has he seen the militia slide down
a mountain like goats, or a beatingheart explode on to a barrack wall?
Even the coffee I brought back in hand luggage when poured in a cup
is an eye, a past dark itching for light.Therefore, I cannot be the memory
of your death, let me bend the waya river does, all shadow and sound,
around a hill, towards a village I once recognised. There are days
when this unplanned landscape speaks its music, above a ribbon of stars,
below a wall of torn out tents and beyond a river waiting as one would
the apocalypse. On other daysyouare a name on a list, given to armed men
at a roadblock. Guns held loosely by their waist. Hovering as catfish
in a shallow pool. Before roads led to you, or Livingston's maps found you,
before the mountains grew their backs, before sight was tempered,
before the revelation on a skies blank page in this perfect chalice of night
you are not the first pilgrim to ask the oracle what will I become me.
If I could stop the sky from stretching its arms across the horizon,
or the serpent Nile opening it's mouth toward a sea, or star blinking
in a midnight constellation as god watches your wife wash silk in a stream
would I not stopped our countries screams. I have the luck of Caesar
his robe his crown and quest for immortality but soon this course
of blue and the way it bends will have no need of me.
Elixir by Famia Nkansa (Ghana)
When you touch me
My pores turn to pupils
I can see you in the crevices of my skin
You leave footprints under my eyelids
Your soles azonto on my irises
I touch my face
breathing your taste into my fingers, your fear into my fury
I cup fireflies in my palms
Cradling them as they flicker
on and off…on and off…
There is residue from us
Glued together
Like tape to paper
If the earth splits
wide like a plum squished in the sun
Will the rays reflect the thin-veined blood
smeared like grease on the cusp of the sky
The threadbare frays of cumulus clouds
The simper of thunder whispering air into the
mouths of shooting stars
If the earth cracks
like a spread-eagled spine
florid, translucent as the dew
gliding
down the underside of a grape
the limpid drop
poised
crouched
gone.
And the earth rips,
split, like an expanse of belly
will you
still
traverse
the ends
of the horizon
to bathe
in the
oasis
of my tongue?
*************************************************************
TREMOURS IN KIGALI by Richard Otwao (Uganda)
Had you been there!
Had you been there in Kigali
When death anchored?
When the nation turned into a mortuary?
Kagera was the conveyor belt
Victoria, the thankless mass grave.
For Kigali, the sun stood still
As men sized their hatred for each other
Guns coughed and brought a great many
A great many thousands onto their knees.
As the tribal instinct fed its fury
Into the hearts of men.
Bullet riddled,
Bodies lay covered in blankets of green flies
Limbless bodies danced in the conveyor belt
On their way to the open liquid grave
As death patronized and patrolled Kigali.
Defined Holy Sanctuaries were defiled
Pagans clutched on stolen rosaries
As Christians forgot to pray
But loved to hate death.
The experiment in human suffering
Was a success in Kigali
Artillery fire rocked the landscape
Echoed and re-echoed
Reverberated and re-reverberated
In Kigali: When death charged.
When I looked across the plains
Down the ocean of life,
I saw Kigali
Drifting like a salvo –shattered boat
Surrounded by ripples of death.
Had you been there in Kigali:
When the tribal instinct
Laid bare, the nakedness of annihilation
In what the world knows today:
Tremours in Kigali.
*************************************************************
Death-fall by Nick Makoha (Uganda)
Before Koni, before Museveni, before Obote’s second term, before now
there was me. We were in deep Shit! Bridges couldn’t be fixed with gaffer-tape.
America stopped lending plasticine to fill pot-holes. I quit playing refugee.
Who among you was going to pay our country’s light bill? Well? You uninvited guests
like Rome, you will know where we put the bodies in their tunics and kangas. My sins,
both real and imagined, into the trap. To my brother my rival, when he comes
don’t let him tap the glass (idiots), devise his death. You stable-god,
a month’s worth of grain for the paratroop regiment won’t purge you.
New wives and shoes and a move to State House while we live in huts.
Home will see your troubles cursed. By the way, your Chief of Police,
into the trap. You who believed in Churchill’s prophecy. You innocents
ruled by a spinning earth, your tears will quench the barns we set fire to.
You who call your guns She.You papiermâché martyrs with north Kiboko accents.
You shadow soldiers who dig dead men from their graves. You in the motion of battle.
You who search the airwaves for the British World Service, who stare
spirits in the face but can’t stand heights, the rules say, into the trap.
I will not forgive the clan who sheds blood for party politics. Your god might.
The one with his hands up as he waves, ask the firing squad to send him
with the widowers, orphans and motherless sons, into the trap.
All you disciples of empires.Mr Men ministers who paraphrase over PA systems,
into the trap. Wrecked after five days of being held under decree nineteen.
Why riffle through your Yellow pages in search of Heads-of-state? Into the trap.
The executioner who lets you watch his navel after bare-knuckle fights, into the trap.
You who played The Bard on screen and stage, or quoted Aristotle, into the trap.
Your second tongue, into the trap. Lumino-boy with that Yankee
dialect, into the trap. It makes no difference to me, you sun worshiper.
Name your Icarus and fly, into the trap. You who abandon your wife’s thighs
for the cradle of a servant girl, into the trap. You at The Uganda Company Limited
(Trojans), because you gave us cotton but took our land, follow me with your horse mask,
into the trap. Those who offer me your skins as a fig leaf, let me carve a map
on your backs to Ithaca. You can hitchhike for all I care, into the trap. Take your stand
with the soothsayer in her snake dress. The ones who hesitate, into the trap.
********************************************************************
My hair Is By Lua Nsume Davis (Cameroon)
Like the ricochet of voices rumbling
down the streets of Washington, D.C. ,,
during the march of 1963. It yells: “Here I am! Here I am!” Even in silence.
My hair is triumphant. Like the exultant echo of my mother’s footsteps as
she glided across that stage to embrace the diploma of a first generation
graduate. It dances to the discord of discrimination, never forgetting that
a symphony is only made with patient persistence. My hair is resilient. Like
the Cameroonian women of my family who toiled selling granuts& palm oil
on the red-clay-soil roadside to ensure that their brothers received education:
women who, despite being regarded 2nd, still moved mountains for themselves
and their kin. It revolutionarily recoils at the oppositional pull of adversity in order to
revisit the importance of its roots. My hair is poetic. Like songs loftily uplifted by my
Bakossi people to heaven during prayer. Each strand is the stanza of a love poem to
God. My hair is proud. Like the coalition of kings and queens crowned with the
curls of their ancestors---whose hair continues to bloom in spite of
the cumbrances of oppression. It blossoms
in common accord with allied heritage
preservation. My hair is intricate. Like
the diverse cloths that kiss the skin
of my African brothers and sisters.
It harbors clusters of contrasting
curl patterns: each beautiful in
its textured diversity. My hair
is a thank you note to the soil
from which we leapt, to sun--
kissed mothers plaiting their
childrens’ ulotrichous locks,
to the men and women
with raised voices and
elevated signs, protest-
ing in Ferguson, MO,
to the parents who
tell their dark-skin
babies, “You are
more than the
world says
you are.”
My hair
Is.
********************************************************************
Dusk dawn by Waruguru Nyatha Wa Kiai (Kenya)
We walked with our heads bowed
Hands firmly pressed on our butterfly stomachs
We rolled like dead wood, not even once did we sway our hips
How did they know?
We walked on our toes in fright
Our feet never crushed an egg shell
We were silent than the wind
Who told them?
We cemented our breasts with mud
Clogged our vaginas with cow dung
Cut our hair and stopped smiling
Who betrayed us?
We never danced to the drumbeats
Our eyes never sparkled like the sun
We have always held our breath
Never have we lived!
When they chased us down the stream
And slid their hands on our thighs
When they dipped us in water
And discovered our breasts
Was it you who whispered
That we are women?
******************************************************************
A Poem We Would Rather Forget by Sanya Noel Lima (Kenya)
thirty one years after the Wagalla Massacre
This is what you remember the butt of a gun landing to your mouth
and then the muzzle pushed
way down your throat
and all you could pray for
was for them to pull the trigger.
This is what happened they came for you in lorries
and you were innocent enough to think
that a Kenyan citizenship
would shield you from harm.
This is what followed they asked for your clan
but how could you tell that
saying you were of the Degodia Clan
was signing your own death warrant?
These are the memories naked bellies on the asphalt
and boots with guns
stepping on their heads and necks.
These are the memories gunshots ringing
and truncheons landing on chests
and the cracking of sternums
and the giving in of skulls.
These are the memories every sternum broken, was your sternum broken
every skull smashed in, was your skull smashed in
and every thud of a truncheon, was a thud to your soul.
This was your decision you were going to die anyway
but the fear in you
couldn’t let you die just lying on the ground.
This was your luck the terror made you run so fast
even the bullets couldn’t catch up with you.
This is your regret you wish you had died too
so you would be relieved of memories
of cracking sternums and skulls smashed in
of unheeded cries for mercy, and prayers to God.
This is what you wish for a chance to forget
that on this day, thirty one years ago
five thousand people were executed
by their own country.
These are your questions Do the dead move on?
Did the ground ever quench
its thirst for Somali blood?
Diz Poetry by Babjide Michael Olusegun (Nigeria)
Diz Poetry go come in many many styles
Since Diz Poetry dey com Uganda
Diz Poetry godey dub reggae reggae free
But Diz Poetry don dey use hin beat
Diz Poetry gat many manytinz to say
So Diz Poetry know know which one to say
Diz Poetry fit no make much sense
For Diz Poetry no come to impress
Diz Poetry fit look- within- personal
But Diz Poetry may dey –without- political.
Diz Poetry will be so long in longitude
For Diz Poetry will be very versed in latitude
Diz Poetry will burst into rhythmic tears
For Diz Poetry was writt’n with wilderness’s words
Diz Poetry is speaking from Africa
As Boko Haram blows up North-East Nigeria
Diz Poetry won’t call on Cupid
For Diz Poetry is lonely not blind and stupid
Diz Poetry is not from “Dis Poetry”
Diz Poetry is only like “Dis Poetry”.
Diz Poetry 4 lov use Gangan’s mouth
Diz Poetry sef 4 lovdanz with Sekere’sileke
Diz Poetry 4 talk of libarti
But Diz Poetry sef don enta captivity
Diz Poetry won halasom poets
Since Diz Poetry owe demobonge respect.
As I hala: Maya- Angelou- Zephaniah- Neruda, Rudyard. NiyiOsundare-
And Johnson in d States plus Okotp’Bitek for izSong of LawinowitJumokeVerissimo.
May I sharpali say: Una go watch Diz Poetry like say na Play on Words
Cos Diz Poetry dey flow wit watery meanings in stanzas of 4 by 10.
You may wanna ask
What Diz Poetry is all about
Or is Diz Poetry simply all about nothing?
Never mind, Diz Poetry has no answers to these
For Diz Poetry gonna slip through my heart to thee
Diz Poetry might make you laugh
And you may wanna push Diz Poetry aside
But Diz Poetry’s two and three
May make you wanna give it a chance
Cos Diz Poetry is simply free, M.A.D and booing your mind.
Evolution by Tolase Ajibola (Nigeria)
(for adonis)
“A star is also
a pebble in the field of space” – Adonis
i
i like to write in circles,
circle is the shape of the sun
when it breaks through ocean doors;
the sun is the end of dreams.
dreams are images pushed in wooden carts,
cart is an idea of trees.
the moon writes endless verses
about the sun's mood
in the night time.
ii
the moon gambles with me,
seven is his lucky number.
he sips beer after each win.
his moustache welcomes froth,
uncultured alcoholic draped in the mourning clouds
at a friend's funeral.
i won't be at the funeral
for time wins Olympics
and this friend reincarnates
iii
poetry lies with the sun,
within it are two rivers
one washes dreams,
the other poisons all things.
this ship doesn't move,
it sank in the current of mood.
i cannot write too
the river is ink and
i am confused…
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