Tares Oburumu lives in Yenagoa, the south side of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. He is the winner of the Green Author Prize for poetry. His works have appeared in Connotation Press, Bluepepper, Woven Tales Press, Afrocritik, and Eunoia Review, among many other journals. His latest book Origins of the Syma Species was published by The University of Nebraska Press in March.

Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Tares Oburumu’s collection is a brief history of where he came from: Syma, a neglected oil-producing region of Nigeria. After growing up with a single mother in the creek- and brook-marked region, and himself now a single parent, Oburumu examines single parenthood and how love defines family circles. Mixing music, religion, and political critique, Origins of the Syma Species evokes pasts and futures. Inspired by the relative chaos found in the origin of things, Oburumu’s poems explore how the beauty of chaos binds us to our ancestral roots. In his poems, Oburumu identifies with anyone who is a single parent or is dealing with the lonely trauma of a broken home. His poems instill hopefulness in a world that has the means to throw many into poverty and agony.

Emerging

The night enters my solitude through the Romani clock
on my wall;
a warm circle of lamp gives light to the thousand words
before me,
the great Langstons, poetic not political, on a desk.

The window opens a new river,
a still bed accentuates the meaning of sleep at the far end.
Childhood & towboats reveal the art of a wall gecko
using the silhouettes as its trap.
A moth flies in semicircles, afraid of the dark.
The holy shelf wants a touch, a simple church; a worship.

My mind like fingers flips through the people,
their historical facts, wars, the geography of love.
I give all the glory to the first book I read at the age of 5
my very first entry into lighteners.
Glory to you, aurora, still open to me, colorful like photo albums,
at 32.
Legendary is its broken spine, covered yet in gold dust,
that never closes, never opens, though like Saint Gertrude’s hands
clasped in prayer, it is the most blessed image of my father’s past,
the horizontal purple in its oaken shelf

sharing love & history, light & darkness with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,
now a glasshouse.
This building as Christine, Biafra’s mistress,
repainted it with defunct phrases
in her love letter to a child that died, after they divided the country
with handsaws
into two rivers, was once a room they brought by picture
to a land heaving to bridge the gap between what was, what keeps coming
as if there is no end to the grand work on nation building or progress.
As if heaven was not built by man.

After the fall of the sun-stained windows, a door unhinged its bolted grief
to let a boy crawl out of loss, to what would not define the living.
Above him floats, like a boat off sail, what was imagined; the disruption
of a postcolonial page.
In him now is another house, one they are building without brick, iron,
or glass.

One book-layer, not quite angry,
quite satisfied not with an unread culture of nettles
growing from split ground,
steps heavy on the tendrils & the question mark
seen at the end of survival sags
sinks beneath me standing footless beside an infertile block
or word asking not to know where to plant the sun.

Asking to know when we should all fall down on love
with our knees & restart the biblical work of Eden.
Playing from a street piano the notes of my coming out
my father’s portion of garden seems not a good place
to neither be bright nor be beautiful,
neither be flower nor tares.

Tunnel

What if there is no light at the end,
will Sasha still call it a tunnel, or passage?
That is the north we are indebted to
the moon in the dream we have been looking for.
We, dying in little lives here in William’s Town
in a remote island, almost a house with lights turned off,
have not been taught enough how to be dark in the light
& light in the dark, or face the sun
with all our reading lamps.

Along the blue terraces of the Batham River,
you could see the swimmers, water-light, parsing oil vessels.

The happy swans go down into the deep,
the kingfisher, phosphorus, nods approval.
One natural light, by staying with them,
keeps burning out the lamps at sea.
The other surprised by gas flaring butterflies,
not too bright for a future expressed as hourglass
(neither hope nor a sybarite’s delight) brings the sun
& its sands down to the night.
I thought, being black as a bastille lacking windows,
I’d seen you, once, blue in Sirius.
Twice have I mistaken you for who I was,
an explorer & believer excessive in the color white—part of the dark.

Understand why I dive into an endless ship, wrecked,
lying at the bottom of my soul,
always blue by my keel.
Why I dive into the waves, dreams first before the head.
Then this fate I have been given;
is a chance to find your own light.