"...The literary evening has come and gone. I thank my guests for attending and the staff of the Ashmolean for their support. I also thank guest poet, Afam Akeh (especially for his fare of Igbo poetry!) It is impossible to recapture the atmosphere of that evening - the poems, the tales, the anecdotes - but here's the title poem to read, and if you click on my guests, it's yours to listen to as well..."

Chuma Nwokolo, Jr. 5th Nov, 2005

They are not buried now, not any more,
There is not sand enough to cover them,
These artifacts (this junk)
Our rampant ancestors have left...

What are these artifacts?
What is this junk?
It is my job as Keeper of these Dunes
To show our guests around;
Now, if you will come with me,

One thousand years will come and go before
These dead cities will nurture life again.
This is the fourth millennium after Christ.
A hundred billion men have come and gone.
A hundred billion men whose breath is air,
Whose flesh is grass, whose bones are dust today.
A hundred billion men who sleep on underground…

But look around you now.

Our ancestors have gone
And gouged their dismal wake upon our horizons.
Each has bought and used and crushed and left behind his cars.
The worms that ate our forefathers, the pyres that consumed them,
Those worms, those fires have not prevailed upon their wealth.
Their legacies are a trillion million tonnes of packaging;
Are dunes and tracts of recalcitrant waste.
Their legacies are dead deltas,
And a million miles of filled valleys.

Look around you now.

These are the Car Mountains, the Fridge Ridges,
The Rubble Dumps that evidence their wealth;
These are the Swamp Countries, the Desert Lakes,
The Toxic Wastes that evidence our dearth.

They are not buried now, not any more,
There is not sand enough to inter them,
These artifacts (this junk)
Our rampant ancestors have left...

Earth is dried and wrinkled now,
She shows her age.
Her oceans gag. Each white retch upon her shores
heaves up wrecks and lumps of sundered steel.
Her veins are bled of ore,
The manganese and tin and columbite,
The gold and silver,
They all are pressed out of her flaccid paps.
Her oil is drained. She is deflated of her gas.
Acid rain has blighted her
Whose seas are fished and whaled.
Her jungle is a ghostly stand of trees
Whose rodents are the modern herd of deer.
In proud Suburbia’s zoo
Creeps a cloned, a trophy marsupial.
The sweltering poles have flooded Earth’s paddies,
Who bravely carries on, a husk.

Here is where we are:
Four millennia after Christ, and we are
Back to building clans around the few, the precious oases;
Back to building mining towns next to
Our ancestors' profligate rubbish dumps
(For there's more metal in the old landfills
Than we can sieve from the womb of plundered Earth).
We are back to Freezer Towns and Auto Towns,
And towns that process waste plastics…
And as for serene Suburbia, we are an elite town.
We mine the vast and stockpiled dross of war.
We process bombs.

They are not buried now, not any more,
There is no sense in burying them,
These munitions, these bombs,
Our rampant ancestors have left...

The state that built Suburbia is no more.
(Blown apart in 3005).
The psychic smart bombs made warring history.
Blew the state apart, and all its rebels.
Toppling, like a game of war dominoes,
Town after town; blew that state apart,
Sensing every Soul of Discontent:
Men blazed once like Christmas lights,
And there was peace.

With no foes left on Earth,
We cannibalize our bombs to
Furnish fuel and fashion life’s necessities.
Drink of the deep tranquility on Suburbia's placid dunes.
We and wars' antiquities alone are left in all the world.
We are the spawn of victors and
The sprig of Darwin.
We think alike,
We look alike,
We act alike;
We won.

And now, if you will come with me,

The next Literary Evening holds in the Headley Theatre, Ashmolean Museum, on 16th June, 2006.
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