Tade Ipadeola: Three Poems

 
 
 
Tade Ipadeola is the author of two volumes of poetry – A Time of Signs (2000) and The Rain Fardel (2005). He has also published short stories and essays. In 2009, he won the Delphic Laurel in poetry with his poem ‘Songbird’ in Jeju, South Korea. He is currently working on his third volume of poetry provisionally titled The Sahara Testaments, a sequence of 1000 quatrains on the Sahara. Tade currently serves as the President of PEN Nigeria Centre and lives in Ibadan, Nigeria, where he writes and practices law.
 
 
  
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Maputo Olive

          for Lisa Combrink
 
 
Your poem nails home horseshoes,
wears hat, mounts steed,
does not look back.
And longing strives but cannot cross
the field. Like Zeno’s arrow.

From now on, the miles
are marked with milestones
of sapphire and a bush
of flowers each
a different fragrance, each a note
from your music that wore a hat
and spurred my wistfulness

into the terraced night.
 
 
  
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Morocco
 
 
Marrakesh is a hummingbird standing still in the sun,
A thesis in motion, stilling tongues and dialects.
I have watched as her streets dissolve in fun
At night, a Mobius rendering of joy’s analects

Leaving Casablanca and its dreams unfurling
With the calligraphy of seismographs, we try
For a trail left by old Almoravids, night calling
The party to a closet of camphor, bracing and dry.
 
 
 
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The Radius
  
  
The radius of love spans
Beyond the fringes of light,
It spans the darkness
And all the world that’s yet to come –

So I love this land,
I love the loam,
I love the clay,
The streams and rivers.

I’m in love with the rocks
And trees, the green grass,
The wind when it blows
Across the land.

Love brings my buntings
Of goatbell orchids and guava scent
Strewn along the paths
Whenever dawn breaks –

Love is my bunting
When I mulch planted yam sets –
When I hoe and gather grass,
To shape into halos.

Liquid is my love
When I spill in tears
On plots of careless green
And parched tomato patches.

My love provides the incense
When we pay respect
And we become reconciled
As the aged depart,
As chiefs persevere onwards.

Love is the fire that lights the pyre
When nothing of the earth
Can hold a gallant more
When nothing idle
May ever more proceed.

The radius of love spans
The stretch of the universe
And time cannot contain
The melodies that love makes.
 
 

  
Tade on Fiditi at African Writers Online.
 
Molara Wood reviews The Rain Fardel at Sentinel Poetry.
 
 
 
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