Poetry by Chetachi Igbokwe
All the Battles You Fought Were Not Yours
All the battles
you fought were not yours.
For others’ delight,
you’ve been masked,
but no one
says these to you
or remember your works
or call you by your name.
You have smiled
against the tides.
And I have lived my life
imagining if the world
will stand a halt when you are gone.
And here you are,
far from our sight and hands
and stories unknown to me
springing up
from persons who can barely spell your name.
My ears are filled;
the things I hear choke me.
The man you once clothed says
you are married
to a certain marine queen.
A car once horned, he says,
and he rushes to the gate,
but sees no one.
He returns to tell you
but you order for the gates
to be open for the queen of the coast
who only you could see.
The queen walks down to you,
her footsteps loud
but she is not seen.
You speak to her,
she speaks to you,
and the sound of her feet
can be heard climbing the stairs,
you follow her from the back,
down to you room,
where she strips you
and make you moan.
The woman whose thirst
you once quenched
speaks of bones
and skulls littered
at your backyard.
She’s fortunate, she says,
to have survived you;
lucky that the water you gave her
did not choke her.
She didn’t speak
of the nights she growled at your feet,
or the days she says your face brings her fortune.
Your brothers’ widows say
you ate their lovers to straighten your days.
You owe them explanations, they say,
on what became their lovers’ bodies.
The people whose disputes
you settled said,
“We never called for your care;
why haven’t you sorted
the troubles that loom in your home?
Why you do not eat the meal your wife makes?
Why you are obsessed with yourself,
that you hung a big statue of yourself
in your country home?”
Funeral Cows
Papa’s laughter
begins in bits;
sometimes, as a wry smile
forming behind his jaw
or a short cough emerging
into a long
and louder one.
Other times,
it would seem
there is something
holding his neck,
trying to choke him;
usually in the middle
of a conversation,
or a meal,
or when he wants to slaughter
a funeral cow.
Mama once said
that Papa could laugh
at a joke
told ten years past—
that the jokes
are cracked by the
funeral cows he slaughters.
