Consolation: On Friendship, Wretchedness, and Poetry

How does poetry help us to bear our lives?

“Poetry is consolation in complexity,” Teju Cole.

Yesterday, I went out with a friend. We visited the OOPL (Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library). We used to go there for debates and other programs when we were in secondary school—Obasanjo attended the same secondary school I attended, so he invited us to his yearly symposium. (I never debated in the program, and I had a desire to.) While waiting for my friend, under a bunch of trees wet with rainwater, which trickled off them and dappled the cover of the book I held—sorry: if you invite me to your wedding, I am going to come with a book or two, I don’t know why I do it (I usually say that I cannot sleep in a room that does not have one book in it)—while waiting, I decided to read and share a poem. I picked “The Rain Stick,” my favorite poem by Seamus Heaney. I read and reread it and learned the last five or so lines by heart. It was after I selected the poem that I realized that my choice had been influenced by the weather—rain beat me as I went to OOPL and I was sitting under these trees wet with rain. The poem I had once encountered was aware of the world I inhabited in that particular moment, because it is about such a moment.

Upend the rain stick and what happens next

Is a music that you never would have known

To listen for. In a cactus stalk

Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash

Come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe

Being played by water, you shake it again lightly

And diminuendo runs through all its scales

Like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes

A sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,

Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies;

Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.

Upend the stick again. What happens next

Is undiminished for having happened once,

Twice, ten, a thousand times before.

Who cares if all the music that transpires

Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?

You are like a rich man entering heaven

Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.

I have read a number of books by Seamus Heaney (two this year), but this particular poem does it for me. “You are like a rich man entering heaven / Through the ear of a raindrop.” Seated under those trees, I began to think of the foundation of Western civilization: the Bible. I began to ask myself, what would happen if we subtract all Scriptural references from Western (and Eastern as well—there could have been no Rumi without the Gospels) literature. The reference to the rich man is from the Gospels: Christ said it is as hard for a rich man to enter heaven as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Heaney “freshens” the image (the way rain freshens the leaves) by making the eye of a needle “the ear of a raindrop.” And how wonderful is the “remake,” like being nourished by water, like tendering your tongue to the sky, how it so slightly alters us into something new.

My friend arrived and we moved to another spot, like a shed, and talked, eating pepper soup and drinking palm-wine. We talked about the near future, so near you can call it on the phone (he recently finished his first degree), about family, about the girls we both new, about art and movies and music. I love my friend, very much. He nurtured me at my barest. I said to him, because I recently thought about it, “I just dey wonder how your sister no send me comot for your house, with all my smoke.” I stayed at his place in Ibadan for almost a month in late 2021, I was still addicted to drugs, and I was smoking in the house, the same house where his sister lived, and though she was concerned, she never once treated me like a wretch, although I was, I was a wretch. Months before that time when I visited his house, I visited that same spot where we both sat yesterday, alone, drinking Budweiser and smoking “Arizona.” I remember that I had a couple of new contributor copies with me. I was so full of myself (even now, if you empty me you will find so much of “Ernest,” but things have changed); I was there feeling fly, young boy writing “big” things and making money. I was using this nice phone, I had my hair tinted, people could easily take me for a Yahoo boy. I had just left WhatsApp and Twitter, broken up with someone I was dating, who sent me an email that I was ignoring at that very place; a few months later that phone would be stolen and I would descend into the very abyss of my life, and I would lose my mind,  and Christ would accept the rag of me, and Christ would tend to the rag of me, and my friend (and my Christian family) would tend to the rag of me, and slowly the blossom.

He said, “No, na, why she go do that kain thing.” Good people (in the sense of people who have a quality of life that is kind and selfless—I don’t believe anyone is good) tend not to know that the world is not filled with people like them. I have known darkness, I have known the hypocrisy of fellowship. There’s a verse in the Bible where John the Beloved writes that Christ did not commit Himself to them because He knew what was in man. Humans are the most terrible of things that God made, our thoughts are evil without pause. It is natural, and the naturalness of it does not bother us. What would I be without Christ? There are things I have done that I hate to remember, and things that I still have not called “dung.” I was about fourteen, in Bariga, and I followed this lady with a strip of her pants showing at the back, her top creased, my hand in my boxers, for about six to ten minutes. My friend, J., once said to me, “What sin have I committed?” We do not know the depth of our wickedness, we don’t seem to have a grasp of the depth of the darkness that lives in us. Jonathan Edwards, in his powerful sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God,” gets at it. What am I / are you not guilty for? And one day you will stand before a God that judges by the standard of Himself. I wonder what arguments we will conjure to make our wretchedness move God to adjust the standard of Himself. Oh, God is a trick, forget it.

I’m sitting in a church right now, surrounded by the singing of crickets. I came to Abeokuta two weeks ago, and our house is situated right in the middle of vegetation, a river is flowing very close to where I’m sat now. I wrote “naming,” which appears in my chapbook, A Pocket of Genesis, in this area. I also wrote a poem about the lepers in the Gospels here, the first or second poem I wrote after I came to Christ, I was bawling, man. The church has short fences, the violet sky completes the walls, there are banana leaves and tall trees in its face as well, the roof is held up by iron bars and there are no doors. I was in this church yesterday, reading my Bible, when I felt a strong wave of lust pour inside me. There’s a brothel around Adatan that I used to visit years ago, every time I came home (I was told of another around Obada, which I never visited), and I felt such a great urge to visit that brothel. It was so powerful I was reasoning with Lust. Like, man, Christ would forgive you. You don’t have to tell your pastor. It’s been how long. I feel strong waves of lust, but yesterday was different. I began to smile, because there was nothing else to do. I told my friend about it and he smiled, said, jokingly, “Let me find you a lady. Make I call. . .”

What to do with a burning at the bottom of the belly? I read poetry, sometimes, most times. Or I chat my friends. I have a long phone call. But poetry gets to the intensity of the desire; the intensity of a poet’s vision is almost usually equal to the intensity you feel in moments of longing or pain or grief. So, when people say things about the essays I write, I read poetry. I read The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, edited by Christian Wiman and Don Share, some of the greatest poems to have appeared in the pages of POETRY magazine. On my way to OOPL yesterday, I began to think of a poem in Pablo Neruda’s The Captain Verses. I was led to the poem by thinking of a road I had walked around Oke-Ilewo in 2017. It was December, Kizz Daniel’s “No Go Dey Do Pass Yourself” was the most popular song around. I had represented Abeokuta South at a Rotary Youth Leadership Program in Lagos, where I was one of the youngest and I wrote poems that guys sent to girls they liked in the camp, I directed the drama for my group, and the MC one night said, “Let’s see where this (poetry) will take you,” in an encouraging tone. By the time I returned to Abeokuta from Apapa, my first acceptance, from Tuck Magazine, was waiting. Because I was a part of RYLA, I was invited to a Rotary end of the year party in Abeokuta. It was on my way from the party that I walked the road I mentioned earlier, the walk I remembered yesterday. One of the people we attended RYLA together was a young lady from MAPOLY, older than me for sure, but I liked her deeply, something about her small but elegant body, and the eyes. Walking back home from the party, where myself and the lady did not say anything to each other, I was thinking of becoming important in life, literally. I am not important yet, but I thought yesterday how proud that boy must be now, six years later. I began to think of Neruda because I thought of the lady from MAPOLY. Neruda wrote about how during love-making his wife Matilda’s small body grew to equal his own—her legs lengthen under his own legs. So magical an image it returned to me in that moment—good language will weave itself in.

My friend and I tried this peppery “asun” and did another gourd of palm-wine. When we decided to leave, my guy held chair first—he thought himself drunk. And I remembered the night he tried my weed in his apartment in Ibadan: it should not be, but it is one of the most beautiful moments I have had in my life; every time I watch Layi Wasabi’s new skit on illegal substances, I am reminded of that night in Ibadan. I wrote a poem that night titled “[The Name of My Friend].” I think I should share it here, because I won’t publish it.

There is an ache that one must flirt

With to learn that a wound abides 

Even the finest flute songs. We easily

Forget that sorrow is never beautiful,

Until dressed, until painted, until played

In the halls of the mind—again and 

Again. Brother, you cannot love your

Brokenness. No, the wintered bone

Won’t mother you. Cutleries or cuts

Called love signatures, in what way 

To dance with your bruise? In what 

Way to honour the dream. Sometimes

A little love is enough to wake a light

In a wounded house. My friend, my

Beautiful and kind friend, whose laughter

I know by heart, tired of the silence 

In the room, turns on the radio. The man

On the radio talks about flowers. The woman

Who sings the interlude makes Waw

Appealing. Wow, my friend says, over

And over. MTN Awuff. Always, always:

Joy is something quiet but sure.

My friend woke light in the wounded house of my life, with his “little love.” The “Wow” he keeps saying at the end of the poem—e don high. He had been leaping about, then he fell still. But because—highness, he turned on the radio. I wrote about forty poems during my stay in Ibadan, very intense poems. I like this one. I really do. Maybe I will be put it in a book of never-before-published-poems when I have won three Pulitzers and a Nobel.

When we were about to part ways, my friend hugged me, all the world hugged me. He was a little drunk; we had had the night of our lives. Now a thought comes to me: What will I do when (if) he dies, in old age? And the answer comes, too, me and my guy will drink at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb—Christ says He’s not touching the wine, because He is waiting for us. It’s in the Gospels, if you are doubting me: Matthew 26:29: “I tell you, I will not drink from this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.” One of the most moving passages in the Scriptures, for me.

The bike man could not come into the estate, on my way back home, so he dropped me at the gate. I was a bit tipsy (palm wine lmao) and the ground was wet. I put on my phone’s torchlight and as I walked, I was quoting poems to myself. I began with the latter part of “The Rain Stick.” Then I did JP Clark-Bekederemo’s “Abiku” (one of my most cherished poems) and then Soyinka’s “Abiku.” “In vain your bangles cast / Charmed circles at my feet.” Kenneth Rexroth’s “Heart of Herakles” (which I always thought was titled “The Heart of Harkles”), which begins, “Lying under the stars, in the summer night, late, while the autumn constellations crowd the sky, and the cluster of Hercules moves towards the west. I put the telescope by, and watch Deneb move towards the zenith. My body is asleep. Only brain and eyes are awake. The stars stand around me like gold eyes. I can no longer tell where I begin and leave off. The faint breeze in the dark pines, the tipping earth, the invisible grass/ Have an eye that sees itself.” It took me a long time to understand the “Have an eye that sees itself.” (Forgive the absence of line breaks.) Then I moved to the first part of Rexroth’s “The Signature of All Things,” which is such a magnificent poem—there’s a phrase: “quivering phosphorescence,” bro! “The saint saw the world as streaming / In the electrolysis of love. I put him by and gaze through shade folded into shade. . . I think of all those who have loved me, / Of all the mountains I have climbed, / Of all the seas I have swum in. . . / My sins fall away like Christian’s bundle. And I watch my forty summers fall, like fallen leaves and fallen water / Held eternally in summer air.” I have skipped so much here. In the second part he has these lines, “After studying for hours / While moths rattled at the lamp / The saints and the philosophers on the destiny of man.” I study for hours so I can quote those lines to myself and feel myself Rexroth. I did Celan’s “I hear the axe has flowered,” with a glance at the poem. I did Frost’s “The Most of It” in scrambles. I closed it, and I always close it, with Shelly’s “Ozymandias.” Those voices walked me safely home.