Gideon W. Barfee
VILLAGE DAYS
We have come back home after long sojourn abroad:
We are returnees led home on this harmattan road
By waves of the dust of an aged valediction;
Fine dust with the auriferous tinge of distant memories,
Particles of the past present raised by the feet and wheels of our return;
They powder our minds and faces as that settling on roadside leaves:
Familiar sights of infancy, the taste of soil, the scent of earth
That settles our senses with temperaments we had lost to tampering cities.
We reach home in the heat of the day and visit a hamlet under shed:
Cocks crow slow time watched listlessly by hens and herds
Basking in the shades as two small boys, with idle care and amity,
Call domestic animals by baptismal names.
Girls, giggling virgins, come home from streams
Balancing water gourds on their agile heads
Their arms dangle loose or waving at those they meet,
Like us, and thread into gleeful chatter of their benign gossip.
We are welcomed into a palm wine tavern – a cool nice shed –
Where they take us to wash the dust off our throats.
We are served white sizzling stuff carafed from grass stoppered jugs,
Our mouths watered by the luring thickness of its natural fragrance.
The tavern maid, in warm hospitalities reserved for strangers,
Fill our calabash goblets and we swill (remembering it a gaffe to sip at first serve),
Here you don’t drink alone in this pub; grab your carafe or your 1litre bottle
By the scruff and fill the stretched-out winehorn of the next stranger by you.
Take that kolanut his neighbour offers you, broke it and share its lobes round:
Wine is best savoured when shared, lasts long with the chew of a stranger’s lobe.
Time, like native wine, is in excess supply, the mere news of a forest on fire will not oblige
The chameleon or his tortoise friend, to know rush hour: we toast to slug time…
There is time, so much wealth of time in time, as after the long drink
We step out in the evening sun and are greeted by salvoes of salutations
From all directions, shakes beyond ache from all hands,
Questions of all known and lost ones, curiosities of plans and outcomes:
An indefatigable ritual that humanizes and naturalizes us,
Us who have rushed time to money and not wealth;
Wealth we left home to find in cities whose sophistications
Confused and complicated the truth of our simplicities:
You may weave an intricate basket, a simple sage said,
But only a plain pot of clay will fetch you water.
Gideon W. Barfee
GOD ALSO TAKES LEAVE FROM A PAST
My sister recalled:
We grew up in times when doors were closed
Because of simple decencies and stray animals
Days when doors were closed with mere stools and wood,
Yes, times when a door could be tied close with grass fronds,
Or with simple mortise of bamboo pith.
Not with the heavy locks of nowadays and yet…
Burglars hide where we sleep and sleep where we hide;
Not with the doubled barricades of these days and yet…
Subterranean spirits still stalk and stroll past
To ransack and despoil our sanctuaries.
She reminded me:
We grow up in days when keys were kept
Under doormats for tenants and strangers alike;
Days when keys were kept with neighbors next door
Or with the shopkeeper across the road,
Kept without second mind, without an inkling of wariness
Not today, where we tie keys to the long locks of our very own beard
And still come home to witness a desolate door-wood split wide open,
As if it just had a rude argument with splenetic axe;
Not these days, even with electronic magic and remote intelligence of its keys,
We still reach home to a house visited by pillage without name.
My dear sister still recollected:
We grew in seasons when water-pots of clay were still kept out
Under tree shades for strangers and travelers,
Filled every dusk and dawn for them to the thirsts of parched throats with;
Those were seasons of droughts, thirsts and famines
Yet they were seasons of trust, laughter and hospitalities.
Not today’s modern winters of so much snow and so little water,
Today’s seasons of so much rain and so little wetness,
Days of so much sun and so little warmth,
Of so much to feast and so little to share,
So many medicines and so few cures:
These are times that boggled the oracle’s prescience.
Gideon W. Barfee
OTHER MASSACRES
Anthropomorphic forms sit around tables and negotiate signatures
In rapine barter for billions; the green grass is going to endure an orgy
When next comes the metallic grind of iron-shod pachyderms
Crushing all, world war-like, on their trail into barren brown:
The teeth of iron feet peels the earth, heaves down a millennial tree
And with the rust of serrated jaws haul and maul all green to dirt.
This is real bankable business, tough and cruel, as smoggy ogres,
Puff black smoke through copious black nostrils, and
As heavy steel contraptions, advancing with their metallic menace,
Fart loud and foul gas through fat, sooted arses – to mess all earth.
They are observed by an apprentice herbsman in a garden of cures:
He is collecting plants for native pharmacopea.
He sees the machines approaching formicidean edifices:
Pyramids and hanging towers on simple earth with simple earth;
Their inhabitants awakened by uncouth noises and crashing worlds;
He sees their minuscule battalions scurry out ready to defend.
But what match: their puny mandibles versus the gargantuan fangs,
Incisors of bulldozing rhinohippos ripping with rapacious rage?
The formic missiles and piperidine fires are spat in vain,
Odontomachean machines are operated in vain!
The grandeur of their Lilliputian architecture, now a battlefield,
Comes crashing down, and their colonies are decimated to detritus.
With the iron show of man-run contrivance past,
The apprentice herbalist witnesses crushed corpses, ruined cities
Before leave, he sees survivors, with remnants of undefeated dignity,
Take to necrophoric offices and inter their dead. Other deaths.