Issue 4:1 I Poetry I Emmanuel Jakpa

Three Poems by Emmanuel Jakpa

Cottage Ireland at Lough Gill

Sunlight punctured three holes in the left corner

of the roof, near this moss covered chair Beezie once sat.

Nothing in particular seems to require more attention.

I throw my gaze out on the lake water,

noting what strikes the most.

Four long neck birds fly across, close to the puny tides

that reel in stairways towards the shore,

and there they crash and break on smooth pebbles. 

One must really like the peace-on-ice

to live alone in this wooden cabin. Hollowness

creep into my heart as I long to confirm

that out there someone is going about its daily business.

I think as our cities become densely populated,

more and more people will desire and seek

strange places where they can take in some drops

of silence or peace into their system,

where they can breath freer; but none will come

and live here, now this woman is gone.

The New Narrative Poetry

for Rob Merritt

The lens of the camera of my mind, adjust here and there,

focusing on some intricate lines

as photographers do taking pictures in a museum.

At another instance, it feels as if I climb up the steep back of a rock,

reach the top – ah!

the ocean  sprawls before me  like the throbbing heart of the world: 

At a point I stop, as if I read and heard a guitarist

fingering chords of pizzicati,

the accompaniment of Song of Songs, I sing along

‘Upon the green bed, beneath cedar rafters, comfort me

like wind from the south through cinnamon trees',

I stop, to clear my throat,

continue, as if being watched,

‘rush like gazelles through the vineyards before dawn

up to the mountains of spices’.

 
Notice the way I write. 

For like ships sailing across unruffle sea under a steady current of wind,

I glide through your poems

on skateboard under the keen propulsion of your narrative, so creaseless.

I relearn a new way of writing without ‘like’, no

without Simile.