Poetry

Harry Garuba

3 Comments

Three Moods, One Sunday

 Dawn

dressed in white
she lingered by the doorway
hanging to the knob with a gentle sway
as the sun walked through the
doors of the east lighting up her eyes

dressed in white
her face flowered before my eye
a dress, a door, a knob, the sun

i watched this Sunday scene
the sun rising on my tongue
I mouth a simple chant

at the threshold of this verb
your soul will open like a flower

Noon

a day of dull showers
somnolent noon of rain
warmed by a lukewarm light

slowly, very slowly the weary hour stretch outside
lingering in dull puddles, brackish gutters,
this cadence rides you slowly
like a dream as you descend
into an oasis of vowels

every noun
pronouns her absence
and in the void of the vowel
the qualifiers become a cortege of sirens
a procession of broken-hearted verbs
brooding on this noon of her absence

Night

grief grips us all
clouds wrangle in the skies
the rain weary of its showers
moans in the slums and
darkness feeds on every face

in the silence of the soul
echoes the voice of a lost dream

a wasted rain, a wasted land…

Death of a Poem

(For Sesan Ajayi)

there is a lie in every line that rhymes
a line in every rhyme that lies

to tell the tale of a boy who loved beauty
so much he could not take the warts
that punctured the rhyming lyrics of his life
the debris and the log that punctuated
the flow of the river and the grace of the seagull

he couldn’t take it here
and one cloudless day
sunshine pouring like crystal showers
his spirit soared above the skies
leaving behind the lies in the rhymes

This dull, dull craft of words
Can it capture the dark delight of his life?

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3 Comments

gertrude March 6, 2020 at 3:16 pm

Harry Garuba’s poetry touches my heart–it aches with the beauty of the lines, the evocative images, the words entangled into a string of literary pearls. I wish I had spent time to get to know this sensitive poet… Maybe he could have rubbed off onto me some poetic imagery..enhance my own stale empty writing… But now you have left us… But I have your words to inspire me

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Idowu Omoyele May 5, 2020 at 1:35 am

May I make a few corrections. First, Harry Garuba was a Professor of English and African studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa; having been appointed an Associate Professor in 2005, he was upgraded, rather belatedly, to Professor in 2018. Second, his debut collection is Shadow and Dream and Other Poems; both keywords in the title, ‘Shadow’ and ‘Dream’, are singular. Third, this debut collection was published by Professor F. Abiola Irele’s New Horn Press, Ibadan in 1982, not 1981. And Steve Shaba’s Kraft Books, also in Ibadan, has since published Garuba’s long-awaited second volume, Animist Chants and Memorials, in 2017.

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Web developer May 5, 2020 at 8:09 am

Thank you. Noted.

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