Now goes summer cloaked in his supple, bright flowers
Now comes autumn in his rattling, slow burning leaves
Now in the growing darkness, autumn drags summer to ground,
strips away the verdant finery and cradles the sunlit face
against the dark humus of his chest, muffling his sobs
Summer’s tears seep deeply and soften autumn’s heart,
before mother winter’s freeze
Waiting for the bus,
looking out on the street of Rose Marie,
my hand goes to pocket’s warmth,
my thoughts wandering
The sting is a hot thread
strung through finger’s back
Distractedly I pull the sharpened thread
into autumn’s cool sun–
a bee, a wriggling honey bee,
takes flight from my thumb.
The stinger remains
There are three sayings from Obara Ogbe that I want to consider closely. The three sayings, while related, emphasize different aspects of an underlying situation.
This is an exercise in close reading and spiritual contemplation. I hope it helps others, but my main goal is personal. I do this to make myself think more carefully on the sayings. The sayings are rich, multifaceted, and deep; I don’t exhaust them here.
My first exposure to these sayings was oral, but they can also be found in the published source Diloggun by Ocha ni’Lele. I’ve used Ocha ni’Lele’s phrasing here.
Continue reading ‘Obara Ogbe, sayings contemplated’
Metal arms pounding through steel bulkheads
Does the atomic furnace of your chest
burn with passions more profound
than the breaking of uranium’s nuclear heart?
Gleaming eyes calculating suborbital reentry
Does the supercooled electronic brain
tingle with doubts more persistent
than the next best approximation of pi?
Flames licking rubber flesh from steel bones
Do radio messages from fleshy, flapping lips
draw forth answers more curious
than the color of super-heated aluminum?
What disturbs the melancholy of mechanical men?
(Just a quote that captures for me some of the meaning of the Odu, illuminates it from a different source. Unsure of original source text. See here for some detail.)
“The fading footsteps lost forever
The eloquent lips, the passionate hearts
All be as if they’d never been?
….
Now all our walking is the paths they trod,
….
So thus the dead do live in us again,
And we the living honorably may die.”
—Paul Green, playwright
(Just quotes, that speak to the time in my life during which this Odu fell for me. Both are from Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno.)
“No other hope is left to the past than that, exposed defencelessly to disaster, it shall emerge from it as something different.” (167)
“For the world is deeply ailing. He who cautiously adapts to it by this very act shares in its madness, while the eccentric alone would stand his ground and bid it rave no more. He alone could pause to think on the illusoriness of disaster, the ‘unreality of despair,’ and realize not merely that he is still alive but that there is still life.” (200)
Reflection of a reflection shows the letter true
Twice reflected, corrected
Light of the moon in water
Sun rising in night’s land
The billowing clouds come with the evening,
All the fiery tongues of angels lighting after the sun
The jagged rumblings of the darkening sky and coming rain
Drowning out the festivities to the unseen moon
Sit still
and you fall or begin to drown
like a shark, all teeth and sudden movement
Sit still
and you dwindle flicker, sputter
like a fire, ready to flash like lightning
through the earth’s tangled roots
And I follow after, planting first seeds
glimpsing first growth
