Remi Raji
Remi Raji Poems
As sure as the deceptive day
you're the only cell in my stem
the stomata of unending songs,...
...
Tonight my verse will find you dancing alone
a hurricane of desires will pass me, unknown.
And I the anchor, martyr to your trance,
draped, in the absolution of your absence.
...
when the locusts come, will you greet them
with tears and blood, in the aftermath of fractured years?
when the termites come with fangs of iron
can you be the grit stubbornness of rocks?
...
I
Sometimes a man gets tired of going to sea as now
when the voices I hear speak nothing but shame, and silence.
When the calabash goes to the river and never returns
The carver is drenched in tears, the drinker is famished.
...
no water runs where the Niger flows
no fish swims where the Benue berths
my spirit is grieved, my grief is long like the rivers
i will not forgive i will not forget
...
I come gently
Like the evening rain
I come in silence
Like the dews of a virgin morn
...
But as it was in the beginning...
We have long been lost to the substance of things
We have long sought the shadow of the masquerader
And we puke in pride and laziness.
...
Trapped, double-trapped, triple-trapped
I feel the outlaw's pain
I know the anguish of exile
...
And suddenly my land becomes a bride again
In this memory of decimals
You're a soulful, full-bodied number
the even envy of oddities...
...
I will like to turn you inside out and step into your skin
To be, that sober shadow in the mirror of indifference
Look at me, slowly, behold the irises wherein you hide
Wherein lies the ultrasound of hidden bleeding images
...
Remi Raji Biography
Remi Raji is the pen name of Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, a Nigerian poet, scholar, literary organiser and cultural activist. Raji’s first collection of poems – A Harvest of Laughters (1997) – has won national and international recognition. A Salzburg Fellow and visiting professor and writer to a number of institutions including Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, Universities of California at Riverside and Irvine (all U.S.A.), University of Cape Town (South Africa), and Cambridge University (UK), Raji’s scholarly essays have appeared in journals including Research in African Literatures and African Literature Today. Raji has presented his poems in Africa, Europe and America. In 2005, he served as the Guest Writer to the City of Stockholm (Sweden). Raji’s works have been translated into French, German, Catalan, Swedish, Ukrainian and Latvian. He has been an “Alexander von Humboldt”-Scholar to the Humboldt University to Berlin (Germany).)
The Best Poem Of Remi Raji
Forgetting...
As sure as the deceptive day
you're the only cell in my stem
the stomata of unending songs,...
Because I crave your lips, and you're not here
I want to forget you, haunted by the paradox in the air
you're the only thing whose epilepsy I have loved
and I have known betrayals not like yours...
Your contradictions have become the theorem
of what it is to love and laugh in the gutters of despair
But I'm also a paradox, born into the treachery of dim decades
I have survived other lives and many deaths.
I want to forget,
I want to forget your face
I want to forget your face in my fear
I want to forget my fear in your face
I want to forget my fear in your face forever...
Because I am possessed, my songs for you will not end
And though the abuse persists
it is in your tears that the diamonds shall grow.
One day when you go out with me, if I live to hold your sight again
the evening will wear a new name, and your familiar places painted new.
I will be the resurrection, you the lives of many who are silenced now.
Remi Raji Comments
Delivering Poems Around The World
Poems are the property of their respective owners. All information has been reproduced here for educational and informational purposes to benefit site visitors, and is provided at no charge...
3/27/2026 3:36:08 PM # 1.0.0
