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Best Poems Written by Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

Below are the all-time best Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu Poem

Cigarette Smoke

On a warm, dew-weakened day,
Watching the grey void of a lost
Sense, anxious moments recline
On whiffs of ancestral propitiations
When rafters regain possession of
Filched roast fish, balanced with
The fumes of a wild dance heckled
By chokes of a chagrined weekend.
Who rises faster than smokes of a
Low tar, ascending
Gently,
Whimsically,
Lazily,
With rings of white life
Extinguished through banalities,
Through clamoured waste? . . .
Such rise — gay, sensuous rise
Of the thin beam,
Goes with every thread of meaning
Long since posted on the banner of
Meaningful dreams.

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A Love Poem

Gold upon gold,
half-hidden upon the burning aisle of earth.
Sickle points raised heavenwards,
where mountains belch loudly from the grass
of spontaneous repasts...

Gold, subtle and cream, posted
for the illumination of half days,
when the moiety of stolen glare visits
the eye of the world.

O Gold,
shine on!
You increase my pulse with that gleam,
so breath-taking, like the birth of a mirror.
Sickle of gold, pierce this gloom of distress NOW!
Fall into my palms silently like a Darling’s lone trinket.

Details | Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu Poem

Dawn

Dawn is a broad, unflawed painting
hanging on the loose threads of light,
hiding first behind wavering bulrushes on 
the soft spikes of day
before spilling the good spell on us 
of a new beginning.

Details | Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu Poem

The Funeral of Dogs - Dedicated to Roald Amundsen and His 52 Dogs

I hate to chortle at the sound of broken laughter,
Just like I refrain from weeping when dancing smoke fills my eyes . . .
But when dogs mourn alone,
I chafe my hands with the cold of tears of solitude.
Monuments and cairns I crave among the icy
Terrains, where dogs’ paws leave eternal marks —
The print-marks of an important visit,
Evidence of life on desiccated earth.
On board The Fram they sailed majestically
In the beginning,
Before joining a steam of blizzards they escaped from,
Returning home, northwards, gelid and depressing,
For a funeral of dogs,
The ceremony of age,
Attended largely by silent yaps of strayed thunder.

Details | Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu Poem

Sinatra

Leaning towards the pride of Hoboken,
I learned to listen with both ears —
And my wandering soul—
Whose cellar harbours old kegs of sweet
Songs that warm the spirits and embolden one
With just one hum of that pleasantly unique voice,
So frank and euphonious
That I crave love.

Details | Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu Poem

Behind the Sun

The faces of the tom-toms were sallow,
So was the face of the sun, dark-visaged,
Red, and starved through a pogrom
That assaulted the peace of the beasts.

Darkness spelt the names of diseases,
Each pronounced through stiffened tongues,
Whited by the scourge of hate – a common
Figure, cadaverous and laconic, but incestuous.

Grieving rivers sought ways to be rechristened
Or rebaptized by holy rills with less fetor, as
Long as riparian languages were still spoken on
Breaths of brooks, broken, but gathered in bits

By hands that leaned on fermented soot only.
And darkness persisted, perspiring from hostile
Beats of hollow drums when fire reaches them
From tormented skies.

One truth loomed: the truth of a disvirgined
Destiny, clothed in serrated raiment of grief.
On its crown, shredded petals of holocausts
Form toothless thorns shaped like lightning.

Death was prominent, dispirited, and hung loose
On strings smelted on anvils raging from heinous
Rape of a blooded land. Shores wept with humour
When our frightened coasts sneezed with mirth.

I speak of Biafra where the land still bleeds
I recall that vision, of a crowded city,
Where signs were hung in heaven,
Where voices were muted by the colour of bold words.

Details | Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu Poem

Buttermorphosis

I recall the rural life of the butterfly
Extravagantly —that proud floating mass of wings.
Her wings flutter from sea to coast so eloquently,
Yet silent with the muteness of frightened breeze.
They are banners with buntings of newness — striped,
Spotted, arched, dotted.
Her flamboyant life history, reading it backwards,
Is an exhibition of time and cosseted patience....
The winged one, aged and tried, schleps to the stirs of a narcoleptic pupa,
Hanging on the banisters of a dear larva who's egged on to
Run the full circle and announce the mating time and a most
Fragile conception.

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Fall

It’s gradually falling
Summer is increasingly lolling
The leaves are gently browning
We can’t wait for October’s crowning
When the gold leaves of lustre 
Charm the fold with their cluster,
Flamboyantly trooping the autumn colours 
And socially grouping them with lullers.

Details | Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu Poem

Bamboo

Grant me rest under your lissome stems
Let me hide from the raindrops — shiny globules
That drip with tropical hauteur,
Rain that harms the ribs with cold rebukes.
Welcome me within your greenish lair, from
Your cane roots to your starry leaves —I insist on visiting
In your prime, so fresh with dew and so green, like
The envy in the gritty eyes of singed composts,
When waving rays of the shifting sun
Bathe the narrow venues formed by adjoining stems
Up, up and up the stairs and dome of the jungle.
I pray to shoot up with you and befriend the skies.
Oh, such elevation!
Fill my gourd with green wine;
Make me drunk with the spewing colours of life.
My heart is open to receive light —from misty dawn to
Dusk crowned with your blessing.
Let it rain on, I pray.
My palms are spread out like your leaves — I borrow the
Innocence of your frondescence.
Carve me flutes from your nodes, and, from them
Raise the cadences for summons, to be accompanied by
Drums fashioned by hands greased by the gifts of
The forests. . . .
Raise the joy, the frenzy, the tone of the ceremony
Raise, raise . . . upheave them
To royal heights — such as yours.

Details | Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu Poem

The Start of a New Poem

It is a night creamed by melting darkness.
Fireflies are obsessed with secrecy tonight
And dim their lights cautiously, frugally.
Crickets and cicadas crepitate with muted
Feelings, sallying wretched, orphaned tadpoles.
I cringe from traditional horror,
Wincing with the power of concern.
Lest I forget, the moon travelled out of town.
The constellation was keeping wake in the outer
Universe, where stars were hired for their lights.
There’s a nocturnal feast going on somewhere
Dimly deep, remotely perturbed,
Beyond the barren brooks beneath transmontane lands.
I hear sounds of distant drums which are silent
On the shoulders of beleaguered cliffs.
They sound like they are being beaten by fettered hands.
Such throbs trouble me.
I hate to be the first to announce the obituary of poets
And musicians, but this moment stifles my resilience.
Darkness lingers with either fortitude or arrogance,
Reminding me of the desolation of higher, clammy
Terrains and narrow footpaths
Where they once schlepped —veterans who went to
Confront the beasts coming for our souls and blood....
I plod on to the place of the throbs,
Accompanied by flickering lights.
But on getting there, the smell of abandonment
Creases my ribs and furrows my brows.
The emptiness, the absence of man and beast
Run my wandering feet cold
I felt lost — like a lone, withered grain in a deep,
Battered straw sack with tiny, lonesome holes.
Itches depress my glabella.
I come late with the issue of remembrances.
Something must be wrong with the night, the illusion,
The world, the fantasies...
Something must be wrong with me.
This orgy of wondering!
The night sleeps on with retired quietude, plenitude.
I retire as well, my bamboo bed squeaking with the
Deliberate noise of the fluttering tongue of flame on
The wick of my oil lamp.
Each cup of silence I drank took me back the way I came —
The tenuous, lonesome, hilly, jagged route I had schlepped,
Drunk with the orgy of the wilful drums and the elated flutes.
My journey was meaningless —like a generation that hardly heard of
Michelangelo, let alone Bernini.

Best Poems Written by Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

Cigarette Smoke

A Love Poem

Dawn

The Funeral of Dogs - Dedicated to Roald Amundsen and His 52 Dogs

Sinatra

Behind the Sun

Buttermorphosis

Fall

Bamboo

The Start of a New Poem

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