Chimezie Smiling On His Porch

What was it that peered into him?
Its gaze pierced through windows
submerged in silence and sleep.
It gazed from the silken indigo sky and stars,
sweeping forth a summer fragrance as trees stirred.
Chimezie sat absorbed on the porch,
the fragrance falling on him, fading
in the checkered darkness, calling forth
his mother aglow, sweeping the porch
some twenty years ago, the little child there
content to watch God sweeping, content
to see the breeze playing with God’s hair.
Yet the alienness that gazed into him
made his childhood feel like a sliver,
a slightest hint, a faint fragrance:
as though, for a fleeting moment,
that alienness was himself aeons away –
yet more intimate than intimacy,
more immediate than immediacy,
an alienness calling forth the memory
of what it once had been: a young man
struggling with a father’s remissness,
father’s words tinged with a shadow
of resentment, a young man struggling too
to flee Nigeria, hoping to live
in Canada, to taste and savour
the freedom Canada would give.

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