Mantis 19 (Spring 2021)
New Poetry
Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto
Something
Something in my history keeps calling my name.
Calling my name with a fibrous voice.
Calling my name with a mouth flled
With patches of Ozymandias’ ruins.
With my history, I grow questions in the lines of my understandings.
Too: I have been trying to understand the analogues in my country’s name,
So I follow the books and the stories.
I know stories are good enough to lead me to my ancestors,
But I have never seen one complete enough to fll me up.
How do one relate well with his past in the present?
How does one fnd something close yet never near?
I am by my country’s flag asking for purpose:
I have traced its moments back to the day
History was cut-off from its curriculum.
It makes me afraid of the future, of my sons,
Of my daughters and friends and functions.
I am afraid.
Afraid of this place rolling and rolling
Into the unknown.
Something in my history keeps calling my name.
I am following the call into this poem.
Following it to the moment I feel ashamed
For how my place has been
knee-knocked by our hands into torn lappas.
CHINUA EZENWA-OHAETO (@ChinuaEzenwa) grew up between Germany and Nigeria. He has a chapbook, The Teenager Who Became My Mother, via Sevhage Publishers. He won the Castello di Duino Poesia Prize, 2018; the New Hampshire Institute of Art’s 2018 Writing Award and MFA scholarship; the Sevhage/Angus Poetry Prize in 5th
Singapore Poetry Contest, 2019; the Creators of Justice Literary Award organized by International Human Rights Art Festival in New York, 2020. His work has appeared in Lunaris Review, AFREADA, Poet Lore, Rush Magazine, Frontier, Palette, Malahat Review, Southword Magazine, Vallum, Mud Season Review, Salamander, Strange Horizons, One, Ake
Review and elsewhere.