the ram's ultimate prayer to the tether

along paths both swift and haphazard, a few lines of christopher okigbo's verse find their way, on a smoky sunday afternoon, to the room wedged between field and household compound, in northern india, where i stay:

for we are listening in cornfields
among the windplayers,
listening to the wind leaning over
its loveliest fragment…..

and from elsewhere within the painfully slim volume of poetry he left behind:

for beyond the blare of sirened afternoons,
beyond the motorcades;
the voices and days, the echoing highways; beyond the latescence
of our dissonant airs; through our curtained eyeballs, through our shuttered sleep,
onto our forgotten selves, onto our broken images; beyond the barricades
commandments and edicts, beyond the iron tables beyond the elephant's
legendary patience, beyond the inviolable bronze bust; beyond crumbling towers...
beyond the iron path careering along the same beaten track…
the Glimpse of a dream lies smouldering in a cave, together with the mortally wounded birds.
Earth, unbind me; let me be the prodigal; let this be the ram's ultimate prayer to the tether . .

okigbo's poetry can be read online, and should be.
photo from shiftingpixel.com