Theory of Countries

Victor Okeychukwu Osemeka

A knife lay on the kitchen table.

A plain-looking knife. Razor edged, like a dagger.

Silver bladed, like a cleaver or butcher’s knife.

I had seen you skillfully slice onions and tomatoes,

watched you chop okra and hospital-too-far, observed

the craft with which you hacked into the hearts

of yams and marrows of cocoyams. I thought:

if mother can, I too can. I picked up the knife.

The chicken lay, calm, brooding, eyeing me

with that trust a pet reposes in an owner it knows

can never harm it and I, eyeing it with the anticipation

a vampire feels before the moon turns purple brown

and teeth sink into the soft of flesh. And then the

blade slid, black mamba across its throat and the

world became a fountain, spurting warm blood and

who can drink all the blood in the world? Who

dam the Atlantic or Pacific? Thank God for grannies,

I took refuge behind the scent of cloves and the

aroma of seasoning salts… Years have passed, the

knife, lost, blood, dried and forgotten. A boy is a

man, grounded in sign language. I know a knife

means murder, a rifle, mass murder. I know the

voice that whispers love, the same commands kill.

I know that blood is life, robbed of the opportunity to

breathe. Live. Be. I know that for a being to love a

being, what a being holds in his left hand must be

colours, in his right a brush and he must paint

rainbows and rainbows only.

VICTOR OKEYCHUKWU OSEMEKA is a Nigerian of Igbo extraction. His poems are a howl against violence, physical, psychological or otherwise. He has been published in Brittle Paper and African Writer. He lives in Abuja.