First Prize: Lute Man; I Still Hold Memories

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• by
• Chiwenite Onyekwelu

Lute Man

The man on the sidewalk drags
himself along the tarhands steady
on a lutedust on his

shorts. All around there are
passersby smooth & stampedingthe
soft yellowness of city light.

It takes a casual look to see
the cut beneath his knees. His femur
splithollowed out

like a poplar hacked from stem.
From our school bus we waved at him,
out of pity I’d say, or maybe awe

—as if his body, disheveled,
begins to glow.Kids that we werehow
we bowed at the first sign of

light: brushfire ashfireflies
Pascal candles at St. Peter’s Church &
to this man softening the air

with his lute. It’s August
of that year. I remember the silenceheavy
as lead& then my

buddy Ken curious as ever,
asked what did I think chopped off those
legs?As if at 14 I knew

anything about the war;
about those villagesraided & charred.
About the bombs & each

maimed kid. We sat in
the school bus, waving & watching as he
waved backexcitedly

intensifiedbefore
returning to the lute.As if to say, See I
survived.In Bio class,

back at school, I
could barely pay attention to my teacher
going on & on about

Charles Darwin.
What in the name of fruit flies was I
thinkingwhat

drosophilawhat encounter
had all that science justified?In one
place, an Alaskan wood

frog freezes its body to
survive the winter.In another a kangaroo,
deprived of water,

hydrates on desert seeds.
In yet another, this man flourishes on two
chopped feetholds

a lute like something
bright. How—running out of time—he
lived as though capable

of bloomingof suspending
time. His body an hourglass. The sands
inexhaustibleunending.




I Still Hold Memories

About waterabout the brothers
sunk & drowning. I go

back to where their memories began.
In every depth, a steel ship.

The port opens& a man I love
walks towards the ocean in

search of hope. My mother calls him
Petercalls him brother.

Calls him every name we imagine
would bring him home. This is the

thirty-sixth year, she says, & then
silence—the way grief

renders the mouth motionless.At Hull
—1949—a cargo ship returns

from Lagos, thick & slippery. In its
stomach there is young

David flattened, his shirt rumpled.
Just like my uncle, you could see the

size of his dreams.His European dreams.
When home is a field on firethere

is nothing left to do but to leave. I know,
because I have prayed for

water& I have prayed for a ship. But
my mother says, Even the shores

are harder than you think. How, after
he left, my uncle phoned

to say he was homesick. Never before has
he been judged by the

color of his skin.Never beforethis
malice & this whitened grip.

I do not know the noun for it, but
here was a man unravelinga man

severed from himself. In Igbo we say
mmiri & mean water. We

say it & what we mean is life. This is
what I want eagerly to do—

to look beyond their wounds & see the
men for the times they healed.

See their eyes radiant with hopethe
sweats they drewthe racism

police cuffsthe freedom they bought
for other Blacks with their

own blood. Memory itself is enough
weight, so I want the

joy part, the part where triumph enunciates.
Where their names—

fresh as ever—are still carved deeply
along the shores.

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