"The butchery is the beginning / of memory" — Two Poems by Annah Atane
Nigerian poet Annah Atane presents two poems that inhabit the horror of war and massacre where collective catastrophe is confronted with private mourning. These verses draw their imagery from slaughter, war, and the fragility of hope and the despair where memory is born from “butchery.” “Scalpels on
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At the center of the slaughterhouse,
a song is awake
toppled walls, void of rafters, tired floors.
There is a flock resting under the aegis
of mourning, I do not wish to rescue any.
Whether bruised or abraded
I do not wish to collect grief from its tongue.
The butchery is the beginning
of memory,
the night it all started—scalpels— landing
on the nape of high-pitched bleats.
Perhaps, it was love and its frolicking
thinking tulips will spring
in a place built for ruin.
The shepherd, in whose name
they were gathered, did not hear
how they hemmed their ache to a song.
Ask the ewe gathering burnt hooves
of her love, his bones splintered.
The blood strewn through the asphalt,
Ask the ash taking him home.
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