Collected Poems

And dried-up bottoms waddling in labored steps

Behind blown-empty bellies. Other mothers there

Had long ceased to care, but not this one:

She held a ghost-smile between her teeth,

And in her eyes the memory

Of a mother's pride…. She had bathed him

And rubbed him down with bare palms.

She took from their bundle of possessions

A broken comb and combed

The rust-colored hair left on his skull

And then—humming in her eyes—began carefully to part it.

In their former life this was perhaps

A little daily act of no consequence

Before his breakfast and school; now she did it

Like putting flowers on a tiny grave.

Christmas in Biafra (1969)

This sunken-eyed moment wobbling

down the rocky steepness on broken

bones slowly fearfully to hideous

concourse of gathering sorrows in the valley

will yet become in another year a lost

Christmas irretrievable in the heights

its exploding inferno transmuted

by cosmic distances to the peacefulness

of a cool twinkling star…. To death-cells

of that moment came faraway sounds of other

men's carols floating on crackling waves

mocking us. With regret? Hope? Longing? None of

these, strangely not even despair rather

distilling pure transcendental hate …