Category writer feature

writer feature: Oka Bernard Osahon

José Angel Araguz 2 Comments

Often when I read a love poem, I find myself most invested in what the poem evokes in terms of connection and disconnection. Love poems aren’t love, but are expressions of the world around a love relationship, a world made up of inside jokes, shared intimacies and understanding. The reader of a love poem is privy to something akin to gossip and confession, and involved in an engaged listening.

pexels-photo-69004This week’s poem, “When We Are Too Tired to Fall in Love” by Oka Bernard Osahon, is a great example of a poem that makes the world around a relationship come alive for the reader. Line by line, the speaker of this poem engages the narrative of their relationship through imagery. Lines like “I felt the cold retraction / Beneath the glare of tossed hair as you carried the pages of your face away,” which moves from the visual “glare” to the tactile “pages” in its efforts to render a passing moment, run on an engine of imagery. Yet, the use of “pages” also implies change, and creates a sense of urgency.

The poem continues in lines that reach for similar turns of understanding. The use of imagery gives a sense of control in a poem that digs into the feeling of a relationship slipping out of one’s control, from connection to disconnection. Similar to “pages,” the use of the word “show” in the final line rings out beyond itself, reflecting on the relationship and the moment, as well as the fact of the poem itself.

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When We Are Too Tired to Fall in Love – Oka Bernard Osahon

We laughed without moving our lips –
Our eyes – signs of joy fading – crowfeet wrinkled gaze.
We taped our selves together within the ineffective hug of weathered arms
And our thoughts shivered between us like a ghost trying to stay alive.
Our feet carried us away from our shadows – excuses and regrets limping behind
And when you stumbled into me on the steps, I felt the cold retraction
Beneath the glare of tossed hair as you carried the pages of your face away.
We lost a moment, when we could have found a tiny piece of what was lost.

We are unraveling even as I speak,
Like a single thread off the warp and weft of the table cloth
That hold the old china your mother gave you.
We are bartering words for points and we have lost so much in this match.
There was meaning in our trading once – with loud voices and broken fragile things
But now the words are bland and though we have not grown carapaces,
We are too worn out to fight the hurt. So we sit on the couch – two distant halves
Watching a show that used to make us laugh.

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Oka Benard Osahon is creative writer, poet and fantasy novel addict from Benin, Edo State, Nigeria. He attained his B.A in English and Literary Studies at Delta State University, Abraka. His poetry can be found on Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review, Praxis Magazine Online, Spillwords and Visual Verse. He was one of the winners of the Praxis Magazine Online 2016 Anthology Contest as well as the winner of the June 2017 Edition of the Brigitte Poirson Poetry Contest. He lives and works in Abuja where he writes at night after work. He can be reached at Twitter: @serveaze

writer feature: Adeeba Talukder

José Angel Araguz 3 Comments

undulate

The East river is never still upon stones and ships.

 

tremble

Always, the chance of touch.

 

leaf

How thin we are– how everything
makes us flap, snap, fall

 

crooked branches before night

They are like hands frozen into longing,
hairs tangled beyond separation.

 

Urdu

A Lucknow courtesan adorned to madness,
weeping Ghalib.

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This week on the Friday Influence I am featuring the work of my good friend and excellent poet: Adeeba Talukder.

What moves me most about this series of short poems is how much they play with chance.  They take on a riddle-like structure to define things in a lyrical and personal manner.  Talukder lives in Brooklyn, so there is the East River as only she can open it up.  She is fluent in both Urdu and the work of the great classical Urdu and Persian poet Mirza Ghalib, and sees the language so tied up in his work that she cannot define it without mentioning him.  (It is also a bittersweet touch to allude to the great love affair of Ghalib’s life).

Reading these poems, I am reminded of other efforts forged in chance and singularity such as Gertrude Stein’s tender buttons and Yannis Ritsos’ monochords.  “tremble” evokes some of Sappho’s fragments, that immediacy and intensity that can only be channeled through lyric poetry.

Read individually the poems stand on their own.  Read in a series the poems play off each other in their focus on movement and fragility.  The line “How thin we are” applies to the leaf but also to the lovers at the end, lovers weeping tied up in the air of language.

Here’s the poet on her work:

God and love constantly elude me, so they have a way of sneaking into all my thoughts and sentences; many of my poems constantly revisit the imagery, language, and rituals that both concepts have traditionally evoked. For me, the two are also intrinsically intertwined; I am a student of classical Urdu ghazal poetry, and years and years of dwelling within its universe have birthed in me an obsession with the idea of physical, human love as a step towards– or even a manifestation of– love for the Divine. I have developed a fondness for the ghazal’s characters and metaphors– the cruel beloved, the mad lover tearing his collar in anguish, the frenzied moth circling the flame, the nightingale singing its songs of love for the rose. Its recurring themes of desire and separation, the slaying of the ego, and absolute obliteration in the path of desire are also among my haunts. My poems are often simply attempts to reconcile that fantastical world with this other one I inhabit.

These words open up Talukder’s work for me not just as a reader but as a poet as well.  In them I see a poet embracing her obsessions, not using them for fodder but rather seeing them as colors in the room she lives in.  That is the way craft works: it is a thing inside you that grows the more you grow.

Here’s another poem by Adeeba Talukder:

God 

What feeble minds have held you between their fingers? Despite your
reshapings and growths and falls Manhattan’s still living between banks.

your tide-fist’s swell
spread calm as water,
as light, light, light.

Nothing moved between the skins of earth and sky. They sank into the
darkness, traced each other’s noses as though it were love.

the soft of dusk
its waist of light

how much of you moon?
how many eyes the night?

***

Happy chancing!

J