February 2017
Uche Ogbuji
uche@ogbuji.net
I was born in Calabar, Nigeria and lived, among other places, in Egypt and England before settling near Boulder, Colorado with my wife and four children. I'm a computer engineer by trade, but poetry is my passion. My chapbook, Ndewo, Colorado is a Colorado Book Award Winner. In my spare time I snowboard, coach and play soccer, and train in American Kenpo. Among other editing projects I co-host the Poetry Voice podcast. A selection of my poems was included in the Best New African Poets 2015 anthology, and I was a finalist for Nigeria's 2016 Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize.

Januarial


In manifest above her head
The morning's thought bubble is spread— 
Oppression chalked in so much white
Blankness on which the day to write.
Just how much shall it write outside
Where even breath is gelified?
One snowball fight and one sled run,
Then all the frozen gaming's done,
So back in over hot cocoa.
One head is forward in the snow
For all the world's circumference,
Expecting with its forward sense
That even mountain chill subsides
With time as other fronts arrive,
Or with a turn at traveling;
It's always sometime, somewhere spring
Beyond the first ice-crusted step
If nothing but the going is kept.
A second head is retrograde
Wherein the hearth's already made,
And mind, and memory, good or ill
Gives comfort having been fulfilled.
A head full of the good old days
Surveys the future as a craze
And does its best to mitigate
Against the cold-bone throws of fate.
Late in the year we watched the storm
Outside our window, and forlorn,
We wondered what the next would bring;
Could we so much as dream of spring?
It always somewhere, sometime comes;
The backwards head grows old and numb.
Step out into the frigid blind;
Step firmly; shut the door behind.
©2016 Uche Ogbuji
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