REQUIEM

REQUIEM for Ikeogu Oke


 Hunter-gatherer in the forest of words that is life
from the lush acre of your mind
where euphony and metaphor prospered, you brought us profound tubers of meaning,
frothing wine gourds of elation,
truths snared in the amber of memory,
 half a century's bounty.

 Iron willed maker, whose fire was chance, significance,
whose forge was silence;
 painter on the cave walls of our minds, whose colours were laughter and reason, endurer of winds and woodsmoke,
whose climate was fate.
 Cold-eyed , merry-eyed diviner
 who threshed visions and revisions; tender of the fire of felicity,
 whose flint was thought;
 conjurer in whom ancestral shades
 and the present tense cohered;
 traveller whose  ways, whose days were an ode to faith, obsession,
whose wine was friendship, whose bread was warm flesh.

 The couplets of your footfall
 echo in the forest of words.
 Quester, questioner, not even you
 could plumb why
the marrow turns to dust
 in the living bone.