Longlisted/Shortlisted Poem: “We Buried the Rain with Our Names Still in Our Mouth”
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 Buried the Rain with Our Names Still in Our Mouth
The land once whispered in dialects of dew —
now it coughs black phlegm beneath the jacaranda.
We asked the tortoise for prophecy; he turned his back.
The yam does not swell in the belly of the soil;
it shrivels like a prayer returned unopened.
II.
Who fed fire to the god of rainfall?
Who taught the marula to forget its name?
There are oracles in the cracked gourds of the harmattan,
but no one listens — not even the wind,
who now wears plastic robes and speaks in asphalt tongues.
III.
My grandmother’s stream has grown teeth.
It chews at the ankles of goats.
Its water, once soft as lullaby,
now smells of diesel, rust, and ancestral weeping.
The catfish are mutating — they grow legs and leave.
IV.
I saw a cow eat polythene and speak in Morse.
The vultures convene a senate on telephone wires.
They read out extinction lists in alphabetical order,
and always, man begins the litany.
The forest coughs up its birds like bad memories.
V.
Even the termites have grown sceptical of architects.
Their mounds now collapse from within —
no outside hand, only the heat of regret.
The anthill has become a shrine for nothing.
The queen died with an egg in her throat.
VI.
Once, the trees kept secrets in their roots,
now they stand naked, scandalised.
The moon weeps from behind cloud-curtains,
ashamed of the choreography of bulldozers.
Even the night has become electric, artificial, unsure.
VII.
We gather to mourn beneath an LED sky.
We chant dirges for butterflies who lost their maps.
The gods are deleting us slowly — not with plagues,
but with forgetting.
For what is man who cannot name the tree he burned?
VIII.
And I — the poet, the witness, the last griot of chlorophyll —
dig into loam with my tongue, searching for syllables.
I write with ink fermented from cassava rot and thirst.
I sing into termite holes. I light torches from snail shells.
I wait for green to answer back, even faintly, even once.