44. Three poems by Chris Abani

A friend of mine recently got her MFA in creative writing (way to go, Jenny!), and one of her mentors was Chris Abani. I enjoyed hearing about his teaching style, which sounded a little like You've found an interesting theme to explore, now run with it. Among other, I'm sure, helpful tips. Abani was in the teaching faculty at Antioch University, where I got my MFA almost twenty years ago. I didn't encounter him because I was nonfiction, he was fiction. But his presence was felt. Anyway, hearing his name again prompted me to seek out his work. Here are three of his poems.

The Calculus of Faith

In the end I realize
every human body is a scripture.
The first miracle was a mango,
full and weighty with ripeness.
The second miracle was a sheet of onionskin
paper torn from a King James Bible
filled with oregano and thyme and smoked.
The third miracle was the smooth
turquoise of my mother's fountain pen.
The scrape of it, the insistent pull of its nib
and words, glorious and alive.
My fear is a hole I crawl into,
a hollowed-out log, a curve in a stump.
If you listen, if you listen—
in the book I am reading it is raining.

Durban, South Africa—Some Notations of Value

Metal giraffes march up the bluff
toward the lighthouse. In the moonlight,
whales, or their ghosts, litter the sand.

There is a museum by the park that houses
apartheid; contained in stiff wax dummies.

The tour bus stops on the road’s edge.
On the right a black town, the left Indian.
Pointing he says: This is the racial divide.

Stopping at the bar, the drink menu offers—
Red’s Divas only five rand each.

Each night the pounding sea reminds me
that, here, women are older than God.

These people carry their dead with them,
plastering them onto every met face.

Yet love hums like tuning forks
and the fading spreading sound
is the growth of something more.

Their absence is loud and I long
for the confetti flutter of butterflies.

Abattoirs litter the landscape with the sinister
air of murder, signs proclaiming: Zumba Butchery,
as though this is where the Zumba’s blood-
lust got the better of them.

The air conditioner in my room hums
a dirge to a sea too busy spreading rumors.

Death skips between street children
playing hopscotch in the traffic.

The woman singing in Zulu, in a Jamaican bar,
is calling down fire, calling down fire.
There is no contradiction.

White Egret

The whole earth is filled with the love of God. —Kwame Dawes

A stream in a forest and a boy fishing,
heart aflame, head hush, tasting the world—
lick and pant. The Holy Scripture
is animal not book.
I should know, I have smoked
the soul of God, psalm burning
between fingers on an African afternoon.
And how is it that death can open up
an alleluia from the core of a man?
How easily the profound fritters away in words.
And the simple wisdom of my brother:
What you taste with abandon
even God cannot take from you.
All my life, men with blackened insides
have fought to keep
the flutter of a white egret in my chest
from bursting into flight, into glory.

Chris Abani was born in Nigeria and became a vocal opponent of the government there. He was imprisoned several times, ending up on death row—but managed to escape to England. He now lives in the U.S. He once stated of literature, "The art is never about what you write about. The art is about how you write about what you write about. I was a writer before I was in prison."

The Ghanaian poet Kwame Dawes was faculty at a week-long writing workshop I attended. I still, somewhere, have a video of him dancing with joy at an evening gathering. A couple of inspirations.