Oko Owi Ocho 

 Consul from Benue State Nigeria

Oko Owi Ocho is a Nigerian poet. He was longlisted for the 2017 Nigerian Student Poetry Prize, Top One Hundred Poems, NSSP 2018. A 2nd Prize Winner for the Korea Nigeria Poetry Prize 2018. He has been published in Black Communion: Poems of 100 New African Poets, ANA Review 2017, and Tuck Magazine among others. He works with SEVHAGE Publisher as a Sub-editor. He is currently working on a travelogue, A Memory of Sad Things, and a poetry collection, We Will Sing Water. He is a member of Aj House of Poetry.

 

We Will Sing Water

 

There is something about the way water sings

Its keynote breaks the fragrance of tender memory,

& I receive you through the pathway of this song

Aladi, here birds are flying in two

& the fishermen sing lonely songs in cold chats

I hold you with water & its sad songs

 

There is something about the way water sings

It leaves me at high pitch of sorrow.

 

I remember we sang to God through water

And you have always contended with him

Until you fell under the machete of the Herders

 

Now, I know the music of guns too

After your death I became a warrior

But I still sing of water, blood, though thicker did not kill the softness you planted

I remember your tongue unfolded words

“I know water Owi

Water is the song we sang to God

Sing water and rebuild me in the shape of God”

 

This country did not wait for me to shape you

So I stuff the surface of the moon with songs and bullets

I howl when bats make love

My barrel roars when crickets moan

 

Every dawn Aladi, I recover you through P a t h w a y of water

Hoping I will carve you into the shape of God…

But now that the sea invites me for a kiss, Aladi

We will sing water on the other side.

 

SONGS FOR TORKWASE

 

Torkwase, I will open my barn of songs and give you tubers of melody

With rhythms well harvested in the green farm of your heart

 

My barn is full of buttered songs with lyrics of old, sung to Nubian Queens

Echoing to reverberate in your ears like divine orchestra that births life

Along the bank of Nile

 

Torkwase, my mouth has graced the flute, and it’s time to bake you songs

That will strike you to dance, to dance the Tiv woman's dance

With her waist twisting boneless

 

And when the bloom of love comes, our heart will grow vaster

Beyond the limit of tongues so you will dance the Black

Woman's dance on adorned black on red

 

At night when the moon knocks on our thatch hut, I will make sounds

In new tongues, with imageries never known to greatest of bards

 

Torkwase, I will boil you a pot of stars and roast you the moon

To be eaten with heavenly honey, the type Aondo himself eats in savoury

 

Ever since I saw the tales perfectly carved in your eyes

I seize to believe in Creation Fiction that you were created from

A mere bone stolen from my side, from your eyes I learnt the creation of man

Must have been from woman, because you are in yourself a perfection

To have flown in Eve's dilemma

 

Torkwase, I will battle against Gods, leave them beaten in nakedness

And make their robes your foot-mat, for you I will commit sacrileges

 

Words are coward to describe what you are, so let me become

A frog, so whenever I deep myself in the warm waters of River Benue

My mouth will bubble with songs

 

Torkwase, when your ears itch to listen to melodies of my songs

I will deep myself in the deepest portion of River Benue glowing with passionate love

Catch you golden fishes tattooed with symbols of my songs.

 

ZEYANI

 

I lost Jesus on the crucifix of your eyes, &

here I am, a refugee in Golgotha seeking bones

 

I remember yesterday when your body was a guitar in my palm

in tender affections, I heard your strings calling me to celebrations.

 

Somewhere, around edges where vows become bones

you ordered me to denounce god, I made an altar at your foot

where I worshipped you with libations of sweat and spittle.

 

I remember the language of laughter in your revelation:

“Under Eve’s tongue, Adam rolled into a rebel”

so, I left the body of God when you became the manuscript that birth him.

 

Zeyani,

the distance from my bed to your grave is infinite

but, night drives me s l o w l y into you

through wagon of remembered promises

 

as if you knew,

you warned that I should never travel deep in the reverie of your embrace

unless I know the length between death and life. But I never learnt

the language of distance, remember? Remember,

Zeyani, how you were the photograph of sweet memory

captured in my grandmother’s songs and old ways of my people?

 

So, what happened, Zeyani? What happened?

How did I find you sleeping in ragged songs of bombs?

 

Zeyani, this is how I found you:

 

between being a continent and a woman

& as stars form into an image of you, my soul surges into a continent of sad poems.