In today’s edition of ZAM-ARTS, I would like to take a shot at what one would need to write good poetry. Like in any other creative activity, the poet needs to take time and think through how to communicate his message.
This is the beginning of appreciative creativity in literary works that will endear readers to a poet. For starters, since poetry is a constant ‘practice of creating art works using language,’ it is a dire requirement that a poet ought to work through his language meticulously.
Language is to a poet what marble, stone (or whatever material isused)to a sculptor and indeed what sound is to a musician or paint to a painter.  The mix and ingenuity applied to the use of these tools sharpens the created art work and turns it into a masterpiece.
And it seems to me that is exactly what Gabriel Okara, a Nigerian novelist and poet, did as we saw in last week’s edition; we now do well to return to it today and try to stretch our imagination a little more; listen to it again:

ONCE UPON A TIME

Once upon a time, son,
They used to laugh with their
Hearts and laugh with their eyes;
But now they only laugh with
Their teeth,
While their ice-block cold- eyes
Search beyond my shadow

There was a time indeed,
They used to shake hands
With their hearts;
But that is gone, son.
Now they shake hands
Without hearts
Their left hands search
My empty pockets

‘Feel at home!’Come
Again’: they say, and when I
Come again and feel at home,
Once, twice, there will be no
Thrice-for then, I find doors shut on me.

So I have learnt many things, son,
I have learnt to wear many faces like dresses—
Homeface, officeface, streetface, hostface
Cocktailface, with all their comforting smiles
Like a fixed portrait smile.

And I have learnt too to laugh
With only my teeth and
Shake hands without my heart
I have also learnt to say, ‘Good bye,’
When I mean, ‘Good riddance’:
To say, ‘Glad to meet you,’
Without being glad and to say,
‘It’s been nice talking to you,’ after being bored.

But believe me, son,
I want to be what I used to be
When I was like you. I want
To unlearn all these muting things
Most of all, I want to relearn
How to laugh, for my laugh in the mirror
Shows only my teeth like
A snake’s bare fangs!

If you remember well, before quoting Okra’s poem I used the word listen because the poem is worth listening to—it has a great sense of humor and an incredible beauty embedded into it.  It means that the poet spent time thinking how he would communicate his message about a
stark contract between the times past and the modern way of life.
There is no doubt that he could have been writing and re-writing the lines as he arranged, rearranged and deleted a word here and added another there and so forth.
The central theme of hypocrisy is not a new one; we all know it and if
Okara had chosen to write a paragraph or two about it we probably
would not have bothered to take a second look at it. But no!—he went
an extra mile to make us excited and involved in his story. He uses an
excellent medium of communication as he borrows an old story- telling
technique from folklore and the traditional narrative: ‘once upon a
time’, patile akantu mukwai, as we normally would start a fairy story
in traditional societies, with a family cuddled by the night wood fire, with the silhouette of shadows in the flickering embers of partial darkness at avillage homestead.
Listen again because this is a conversation between a father and a son, two contrasting generations— one, a symbol of a lifestyle of decadence and another, reminiscing the loss of innocence and sobriety; the new and the old at cross roads, juxtaposed!
As can been seen, Okara, armed with a narrative and story-telling technique tells his tale with easy and great humor evoking laughter as he mirrors back to us a society gone haywire. Okara uses interesting images and metaphors as we meet people who laugh witty their teeth,
shake hands without hearts, who say,glad to meet you, when they are actually cursing in their hearts and wish you were gone immediately;
it is a pantomime of lifeless humans.
See how Okara winds up his poetry, with the speaker wanting to be where he one was, to unlearn how to laugh and to be like his son.
Interestingly, his son is not a product of the past although he
appears to be an embodiment of what once was, by age at least, which
was once his father’s age.
The lessons we learn from Okara’s poem is that he uses the common
themes of everyday life but  wraps them  in overt  expressive
language, imagery, symbolism and a narrative technique from the
African  folklore. Simple as the style might be, we get his message as
we laugh at our own folly and human inadequacies.
Now listen to another poem, a conversation between a Child and a Bird
on the banks of a river or a delta by John Paper Clark, another
Nigerian poet and renowned essayist:

SREAMSIDE EXCHANGE CHILD:

River bird, river bird,
Sitting all day long
On hook over grass,
River bird, river bird
Sing to me a song
Of all that pass,
And say,
Will mother come back today?

BIRD:
You cannot know
And should not bother;
Tide and market come and go
And so has your mother.
How do you relate John Paper Clark’s poem with Okara’s?  What makes it so beautiful in communicating the message with the reader? It is clear that poems need time and great imagination to write. Their beauty and resonance lies in just that.