Two Poems

Chiwenite Onyekwelu

Screenplay

In the neighbourhood block,
some eight kids are playing war.
Above their heads, a falcon
hovers, leaving enough black
holes to swallow the sun.
On the map, something is burning.
I watch them through a spot
from the blind: the youngest with
his stick named gun,
that one time a bomb detonates, the
dying afterwards. There is
nothing beautiful about his death, or
that one’s, or another neigh-
bourhood boy flat on his face. At the
corner, a sunflower bows its
yellowed head, as if in fury, as if it
knows there is a country
somewhere on fire. In the real war,
a soldier bursts his
body open to block the advancement
of enemy tanks, a whole
bridge littered with scalp. In the neigh-
bourhood war, someone is
standing, is kneeling, is asking his own
friend to cut through him.

in narrating the biafra war

              (1967-70)

my grandmother 
skips the part about a rupture,

                  about my grandfather –
                the way his tendons blew open 

& unmade & hollowed out 
& what other word to suffice 

                    for pain? sometimes I ask
                  why aren’t there pre-war photos

of him & she says
photos are the easiest way 

                       to document grief,
                    to run backwards into time 

until you can see the
rifle the trigger the finger

                          getting on its nerve.
                       again a body falls headfirst 

like some tulip plant
& death, like eden,                                      

                          becomes its original
                         sin. In one story, cannibal

soldiers dish out a 
girl instead of food:

                          pork-meat earlobes. 
                         rosemary nipples. thighs 

mistaken for fish. 
my grandmother says 

                          whatever the war 
                         touches begins to burn,

so we sprinkle her 
body to put out the heat.     

                          see – the outcome is 
                         always unchanged. Even  

underwater there are 
things you just can’t stop 

                        from charring to ash.