Obododimma Oha

Obododimma Oha teaches Stylistics, Literature & the New Media, Semiotics, and Creative Writing in the Department of English, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He is also a fellow and postgraduate coordinator of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Ibadan. A regular contributor to features and discussions on Wryting-L and Cellular Wryting, he has published his poems in Sentinel Poetry Online, Agenda, and Postcolonial Text. His critical essays have appeared in American Drama, Mosaic, Portal, Interventions, Mattoid, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, African Anthropology and Mots Pluriels among others.

A poem that is a poem
Walks in
Measuring its footsteps
Talks, only because it has to
Its presence already speech

Not vain, it comes
Dressed light
In-its-own-image

A poem that is a poem
Makes the sight the sound the insight
On your virtual future

Ekpo

Wild body,
Soot & mud & smells
A stain stays the road

Wild body
Wild speech
And untiring chase

Unam ikot!
the howling fear the toothed conquest
always
eats this foliage text

He the 'he'
walks tall
into a dream of carved wood

The mime the mystery around
market & marked shrinehouse
long after
the tiny bell has found the distance

Battlesomenow

Battlesomenow,
Old selves in new selves,
Oneself in many selves
Somewhere anywhere nowhere
explodes

Battlesomenow
In the raging tyranny of old numbers
This self consumed in that self

The look in that face
The fire in those eyes,
Stealth on stone
In the red-red-red surround

The owls dig up the night,
Dead narratives of living agonies
Dropped in every glance

Battles of may that must
And costly victories
That crown every do with a die