Photo by Nick Fancher
A Quiet Song
Jonathan Chibuike Ukah
In a small village east of the Niger,
where the silk sticks to the silent trees,
and rosy rivers rivet towards the hills,
the howl of the owls and wolf bites
went unnoticed but caused rivulets
that stirred the town’s heart into disquiet,
a young woman spent her time
hawking expired roses to her ancestors.
She harvested them from her farm
which her parents helped to plant
before death hauled them on its carriage,
arguing they belonged somewhere else.
She could not stop the catastrophe,
though her lineage called it a mystery
that killed the tensile strength of heroes,
as if grief understood such language.
Unable to sell these pages of her misery
to someone else with soft and hushed voices,
she sang of a land where her body was a rose
planted in a garden to grow into a tree,
like the tree of knowledge of good and evil,
the tree that belonged to no one in a crowd,
which fruit was for everybody and nobody,
where no help was close without a pimp,
where her blood spilled out as a sacrifice.
The citizens arrive one by one to pluck a leaf,
chew it as herbs and go away healed, comforted
or feeling healed of whatever heartache they had,
singing a quiet song in their new hearts,
the same song that she had sung all her life.
Jonathan Chibuike Ukah
In a small village east of the Niger,
where the silk sticks to the silent trees,
and rosy rivers rivet towards the hills,
the howl of the owls and wolf bites
went unnoticed but caused rivulets
that stirred the town’s heart into disquiet,
a young woman spent her time
hawking expired roses to her ancestors.
She harvested them from her farm
which her parents helped to plant
before death hauled them on its carriage,
arguing they belonged somewhere else.
She could not stop the catastrophe,
though her lineage called it a mystery
that killed the tensile strength of heroes,
as if grief understood such language.
Unable to sell these pages of her misery
to someone else with soft and hushed voices,
she sang of a land where her body was a rose
planted in a garden to grow into a tree,
like the tree of knowledge of good and evil,
the tree that belonged to no one in a crowd,
which fruit was for everybody and nobody,
where no help was close without a pimp,
where her blood spilled out as a sacrifice.
The citizens arrive one by one to pluck a leaf,
chew it as herbs and go away healed, comforted
or feeling healed of whatever heartache they had,
singing a quiet song in their new hearts,
the same song that she had sung all her life.