We Heard Nothing, by Ikeogu Oke

Posted on September 17, 2019

We heard nothing until we walked the labyrinths

And came to the path of thunder, and heard his voice crack

The clouds, trailing a forked tongue of lightning,

A rainbow of words, resplendent and mysterious,

Cascading on its curved path

Yet we heard so much

Even as we heard nothing.

Did we not hear because we did not listen hard enough?

Or could we for a while have been hard of hearing?

Or did we need a special ear or new skills in listening to hear

Words such as he spoke to thunder in the labyrinths

Of our soul with tense rumble?

Words that burst through heaven’s gate and traverse distances

To reach our silences and transcend the limits of our soul.

Poet and enigma!

Soldier lost to a Pyrrhic triumph!

He spoke and we heard nothing.

“NOW THAT the triumphant march has entered the last street

corners,

Remember, O dancers, the thunder among the clouds . . .

Now that laughter, broken in two, hangs tremulous between the teeth,

Remember, O dancers, the lightning beyond the earth . . .

The smell of blood already floats in the lavender mist of the

afternoon.

The death sentence lies in ambush along the corridors of power;

And a great fearful thing already tugs at the cables of the open air,

A nebula immense and immeasurable, a night of deep waters –

An iron dream unnamed and unprintable, a path of stone.”

Even now his words echo in our midst;

Again his feral nation bays for blood;

Its mangy hyenas flash their crooked fangs.

He spoke and we did not hear;

He speaks and we do not listen.

The Halcyone Literary Review

Volume 2 * Fall/Winter 2018

Ikeogu Oke is the winner of the 2017 Nigeria Prize for Literature, awarded for The Heresiad, his book-length, musical and dramatizable epic poem. His first published poem, Circulating Good, was written at age 19 and published in 1988 by Unity Magazine. Since then his poems and other writings have been published in Unity Magazine and variosu other outlets on both sides of the Atlantic, Europe and Asia. Oke graduated with a BA in English and Literary Studies from the University of Calabar and an MA in Literature from the Univeristy of Nigeria, Nsukka. He is also a performance poet and has performed his poems in several countries including the United States, Nigeria, and South Africa.