Longlisted Poem: “We Marry the Thunder to Delay the Rain”
AGBEYE OBURUMU, known as Agbeyetalks, is a multiple award-winning poet and multidisciplinary creative. He is the most recent recipient of the KEEP Prize for Performance Poetry in Nigeria. A lifetime member of academic societies in Japan and India, he also holds fellowships with the African Liberty Writing Fellowship and the International Organisation for Academic and Scientific Development. An alumnus of the 2025 Building Bridges Project for Creatives, his work appears in Brittle Paper, Spillwords, and Aké Review. He has been featured in US Times, Punch, The Nation, Vanguard, and Kaftan TV. His latest project, a 36-track spoken-word poetry album titled “Mine Too Counts”.
We Marry Thunder to Delay the Rain
In the beginning, the gods arrived late —
they blamed the road and the rain and a misfiring prophet
whose tongue got stuck in reverse.
By then, the goats had already voted,
the yam had taken an oath of silence,
and the king’s shadow was eating itself behind the palace.
We built our constitution on a gourd of palm wine,
signed it with feathers dipped in snake spit.
Article One: All Citizens Must Hum While Walking.
Article Two: The Moon Is Subject to Taxation.
Article Three: Silence is Treason.
Our anthem? A chicken coughing in the dark.
Our currency? Cowrie shells and borrowed time.
Our national hero is a man who once outstared a lion
by pretending to be sleep.
The elders meet on Wednesdays to forget the past.
They wear leopard skins and speak in riddles
only termites can decipher.
Their memories are wrapped in banana leaves,
stored in the mouths of calabashes,
and watered with ancestral spit.
We are a people who marry thunder to delay the rain.
We peel laughter from the bark of iroko trees.
Our prophets dance backwards into the future,
where every child is born with a briefcase and a receipt.
Here, even the rivers take bribes.
My uncle was appointed Minister of Empty Things.
He governs the space between questions and answers.
He wears three hats to confuse the ancestors.
He once arrested a mirror for reflecting the truth.
They say we are blessed.
That we sleep in coffins carved from mango wood,
that we bury our names to make room for new slogans.
Even the wind here campaigns during elections.
Even the dead attend press briefings.
At night, I sit with the village lunatic —
he speaks perfect French when no one is listening,
claims the earth is round but our country is folded
into the pocket of a hyena.
He told me,
“We are not mad. We are merely dreaming louder than the rest.”