Introduction Poetry emerges from a unique way of looking at life, a unique way of feeling, within the matrix of language. The great questions of life are poetic questions.
“If an apple falls, does the moon fall too?” asked Isaac Newton. This question gave rise to the science of gravity and the invention of quantum physics.
The poems in my first collection were gathered over a period of a decade or more. I had just accomplished a transition from science to writing, from physics to poetry. Early on I saw poetry sublimated in the great scientific equations. Poetry for me then was as much about observation as capturing feelings that were roaming around in the mingled universe of those years. These poems are a fisherman’s net of the political, the romantic, the metaphysical, and something of history as it is lived.
No poet writes their poetry alone. Not when there is suffering all around. The pen is moved by flowers and by pain, what Virgil called the tears of things.
There are many kinds of poems in this book: love poems, reflections about life, poems about injustice. Writing for me is intrinsically poetic. And poetry is as much about what you find as what you make.
I have found poetry in many unlikely places.
For many, poetry is a vocation; for others, a rigorous daily craft. For me it is a destiny.
The elegies of Africans can be as full of lamentation as of joy, as full of grief as of spiritual mysteries.
They embrace the world.
They Say They say
Love grows
When the fear of death
Looms.
They say
Courage looms
When the fear
Of never loving again
Disappears
In the smell of the enemy
Who crushes us so much
We can only fight.
Love and courage grow together
When the flesh is rawest
And the spirit charged
And distorted within the nightmare
We see the possibility
Of a future.
Copyright © 1992 by Ben Okri. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
