Sentinel Nigeria Issue #4 is out!

You'll enjoy this edition of Sentinel Nigeria, and that's not because I'm in it, but of course because I'm in it!  This edition features an interview with Ismail Bala, poems from Funmi Aluko, Okoduwa Tanko Mature and many others. Here's a poem from the ezine.

The Mislaid Bracelet and the Bandaged Wrist

(A Variation on a Theme by C P Cavafy)

I

Now I turn and trudge back with you,

Our eyes rummaging the dirt for that bracelet,

Mid-day sun so cruel it seems the very light

Is being sabotaged and will soon be gone

As its vast furnace dissolves.

And you,

Squatting on your knees among pebbles and grass,

Your shadow, lost beneath the horizon encircling us,

Turns this submerged path into a wandering boat

Where now we’ll continuously be together,

As time, dazzled by the day’s splendour, ignores us,

And the blood throbs in your bare wrist. 

II

She said she had injured herself on a staircase, or had tumbled,

but certainly there was some other reason

for the injury, for the bandaged wrist.

She was reaching up the top for a shot

she wanted to take more closely

when the bandage came unloose. A tiny blood ran.

I tied it up for her again, wasting far too much time

over the edging; she wasn’t in pain,

and—to be candid—I liked starring at the blood.

That blood. It was all part of love.

When she left, I found a piece torn from the bandage

under her seat, a strip I should have dumped

straight in the bin—but I picked up and raised it to my nose,

and kept there a long time:

her blood on my nose, o dear, my beloved’s blood.

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