Joseph Ndukwu – MOWAA Listening Sessions Call and Response
Poem Title:
The Museum of Memory
The Museum of Memory
a lyric, for a friend
Do you not see that there are ways
to understand the monument of our being,
to deepen, at every outpost, the meaning of our life?
Do you not see that I have held you,
the way summer grass holds the heat,
with the fragile tenderness of something dying?
Do you, then, ask why I have built you this place
On the edge of a city that fell to foreign powers in 1897,
as though we ought not to make a place for memorials?
Did you see in your distant rustic dream the coral beads
hanging in that passage of amber light and small windows,
round like moon discs on the clay back of earth, where memory
wavers like shadows, heavy with the smell of patchouli?
What am I doing, being forgetful again, speaking
of a distant dream? Isn’t there a spreading sweetness in the air?
Joseph Omoh Ndukwu is a writer, editor, and art critic. His work has appeared in Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Transition, Waxwing, Off Assignment, and elsewhere. His essays on art have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Sole Adventurer, Contemporary And, The Republic, and in catalogues and journals. He is currently associate editor at A Long House.
This contributor is a member of The Onoma Creative Circle, a poetry collective in Benin City brought froth through a workshop by Inua Ellams during his residency at MOWAA.