"The centre of the world" by Chukwuemeka Godwin Nwag

Your earthen pots are lying the way you left them, ma

We have eaten the fattened cock that you left for us

We have dug up the cowries buried underneath your pillow

But we didn’t know the way to the sacred streams

Breathing within your stories

On the way, we stopped to fall ripe mangoes

Dirty and noisy and starry-eyed like children of spirits

The forest was dark, no light was coming through

Then we saw something like a shrine in the middle of the forest

With some small small pots lying outside the shrine. Smoke

was coming out from one of them. It was like

the ground, the earth was throbbing like

the heart of a dead animal

And the grounds beneath our feet were wildly performing

in a general parade of all the elements, and we fazed spectators

had better join at once or not. I thought I was lost.

I have since learnt that home is the centre of the world

Of one world or several worlds, rounds like a pot or a hundred pots

without a direction or directions, face or faces

Are we right-side right or belly-front back? Are we still sane?

Here, each pot is like a planet, bearing my own stories

like the mysterious breathing of the streams in your own stories

Every night, I see those pots revolving around me

I stand erect, no phantoms in my head, reach out with all my fingers

I see my earth, my sun, my moon, my nine planets

Out of them splash the streams of cooling water

The way of life that you have lived and have offered to me,

this solid ground to stand on and to engage grounds

I am the centre of the world

The four cardinal points meet in my head.

Chukwuemeka Godwin Nwagu is a 300-level student of the Department of Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Enugu State. He has published a poem in the 2015 Young Writers’ Literary Journal and a story in the Kalahari Review.