Writings / Poetry: Wale Adebanwi

IV

How can I tell if I would waltz again,
when you sat my lieutenant outside the dance floor?

Yesterday, it rained in Grahamstown.
Yes, it did,
with the showers falling on the roof of my suite
at the High Corner like the beginning of a torrent.
I heard the rain beating on the roof,
on the glass window and on the grass
and on stone floors outside the semi-secluded suite
like a scolding, first gently, then in staccato,
but later, it struck insistently.

The music the rain composed was like Bernstein’s Second Symphony,
“The Age of Anxiety”; the lines
would take a while to form themselves
in the mind of the master-composer, and then
queue out of the genius’s mind like orderly and obedient progeny.

The rain conducted “The Masque” too, riding, no, rising
and falling like symphonic melodies.
It soon stops, though,
petering out in cadences and seemingly holding its breath
for an applause.

Pity, there was no audience,
so the silent interval could only beckon the rain to beat again,
as if in the beginning of yet another symphony,
but one derived from a Miltonian sonnet.

You wouldn’t sway to the rain, would you?
Even if your Prussian blood calmly appropriates the symphony,
gently still, still gently, like an heritage lost in war, but reclaimed in dignity?

Whose dignity, my dear? Whose war?
What were you avoiding with your cool and comely rebuff,
when the rebuff dissolved into gentle nods,
nods in nods, nods for nods,
nods calmly delivered, in succession,
but mildly disconfirming?

The forgotten war, or the approaching battles,
rising in crescendos or descending in decrescendos?
An octave raised like the spear of the Zulu
against the bayonets of the invading army?
A clarinet slapped in the back of the opposite-formation
like the playful lusts of hopeful lovers,
collapsing into merrily trysts?
Thrusting deep, trusting deed, trusting still.
Didn’t the singer croon that “guilty feeling’s got no rhythm”?
Where then is the rhythmic in innocent feelings?

You took my errant sonnets
and mixed them with stabilizing symphonies,
matched my itinerant dirges with a stable concerto,
constantly repeating, like a playlist with only one song.

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