Romeo Oriogun - The Register of Disappearance

I

Along the passageway of griots, on seeing row

after row of photographs showing the Herero

and Namaqua genocide, a historian asked

me, what mercy is given to those who slip

into dust, spilling their lives into the darkrooms

of our imagination? I couldn’t answer,

I turned to the trays

filled with small chops and wine,

hiding from the glasses on his face.

It has been years and still,

I am searching for a way to bury

these poems into a memorial of care.

Along the highway that leads to Rivers,

tables covered with runes filled with dried

blood, heavy with slain antelopes, offer

a glimpse of terror to those who seek

the battlefield of the oppressed.

Every violence has its own spectator.

And late at night when owls listen to the world,

when the first tendrils of new yams hunger for light,

I imagine the polar bear who sleeps at the foot

of a disappearing world, the man who flinches

as a bullet moves towards his own death.

I, too, have been a spectator of terror, drawing

from the end of a city the lyric of smoke.