Achara Soup Poem by Chima Ononogbu

The sweet aroma tags along with the wailing steam
leaping out of a hot little pond of greeny stems soft as sky's face,
in a wide-mouthed ferry from the kitchen
down to the dining where we oft sit for dinner
with eyes drawn out and hanging over a long table
long seared by different degrees of hotness.

A steaming glow of greenish-yellow, Mama's
Achara Soup, in a fortress-like bowl, swarmed
by assortments of cow and goat meats and dry fish marinated
in local herbs and spices that make the eyes
insane with pleasant tears and the mouth
they grant its long-awaited watery spicy wish.

Somewhere, in that same hour invaded by darkness,
a fellow lays in a wooden bed stripped of comfort, all alone,
with eyes that point upward toward a smoke striated ceiling,
dutifully foraging the swift-moving windy landscape
in search of a whisper or a chirp bearing gracious dawn.
For him, the night is a shattered piece of light
accursed with greedy emptiness that drills his bowel
now choppy like hungry deep.

But here, around a dining table awash with mouthwatering flavors,
in a house with a temperature of sumptuous hotness,
are our hands back and forth, the table to our mouths,
with orbs of fufu soaked in a hot greenish-yellow river of delicacy,
which we send down our stomachs in a descending angelic order
with a jar of white, light-spirited palm wine.
Afterward, papa would lean back on his chair to massage
his protruded belly in a merrymaking circle.

Truly, Mama's Achara soup is a lonely sweet rain
in the wild desert of an apocalyptic drought.
It is the fulfilling light in a dark tunnel of hunger.
Now it plays a billiard of nourishment along the streams of our bowels.

In a little while, musing on Mama's recipe,
we drift away into pleasant places,
beyond the eyes of mortals, far into the whited cloud,
under the long stillness of the night,
until our senses become an abandoned bundle of flesh,
free of the task and deaf to the echoes of nightingales.
Then upon the wings of the wind our souls climb,
into the shoulders of sweet dreaming stars.