Monique Ngozi Nri

Mum on the porch with me

bougainvillea and palm trees

shimmering through the padlocked trellis gate

Lest you bend too far and fall in the garden

a fleeting moment in a year of wait and see

Who you are is glistening

All comes from some mysterious hand of god glistening

whom I have yet to believe in me

There is no counting for her mercy, so you see

this woman whose voice talks like the Shak Shak tree

there is joy and recognition yet fear and loathing at the gate

longtime since I could share my grief and gratitude for your garden

It is the rejecting that hurts being turned away from the gate

but then too the skin of your dignity glistening

the childlike playing in the simple garden

Somewhere inside there the you is me

I look into those greying eyes and think of tamarind trees

the fierceness that is there I truly see

Without the love of recognition, who can I see?

And then confusion, you lose your steady gait

One moment blue skies marked by towering Sandbox trees

the next cloudy, murky, dark even, no glistening

One moment giddy with laughter, here with me

the next, sad and full of sorrow, plumbagoes dying in the garden

I am not here to see you grow so old as bearded fig trees

as you saw me grow through all my tumult in your garden

It should not be that we stand beside these oceans glistening

in different nations so very hard to see

But so it is mama we cross the gate

so it is the way you slowly leave me

Glistening tears fall from silver birch trees

Me waiting in the luscious garden

See how we come together at the parting gate

If you've never eaten powdered eggs
you will not know what I mean
If you've never wished, prayed for
vultures to go away,
you will not know what I mean

If you never called your father, uncle
because you last saw him ten years ago
when his face was creased
with smiles,
not with grim weariness

OR

Scrambled across tabletops
as bombs dropped,
and windows shattered
on that military target,
your home

If you've never seen a woman,
an ordinary orange seller,
still running as her head
rolls down the street
You could not understand

That liberation is fought for,
by a whole people
That fighting is more than words
That dying is less frightening,
than living controlled.

Feet firm on the ground
rooted like ancestors and palms
by the sea of stormy protests
and hurricanes

land,
land of mine
And going home across fields
Where feet are blown to other lands

Firma solid
solid packed earth
free to walk on
in spite of quakes and other low
line rumblings five fathoms down

Who walks with me on higher ground?

Terra Firma

who knows, knows the
certainty free and unfree
clear and not
clear truth yet
not true

Terra Firma