Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment from the repetitive cycle of destruction lies, after all, not with Ogun’s
dare against original chaos but with the defining act of that primal rebel,
Atunda:
You who have borne the first separation, bide you
Severed still; he who guards the Creative Flint
Walks, purged spirit, contemptuous of womb-yearnings
He shall teach us to ignite our several kilns
And glory in each bronzed emergence
All hail Saint Atunda, First revolutionary
Grand iconoclast at genesis – and the rest in logic
Zeus, Osiris, Jahweh, Christ in trifoliate
Pact with creation, and the wisdom of Orunmila, Ifa
Divining eyes, multiform
Evolution of the self-devouring snake to spatials
New in symbol, banked loop of the ‘Mobius Strip’
And interlock of re-creative rings, one surface
Yet full comb of angles, uni-plane, yet sensuous with
Complexities of mind and motion.
(–)The scrambled, disjunctive ordering of these lines reflects the incredi-
ble diversity of the sources that went into the conception of this poem,
as well as the great ideational ecumenism of its achieved artistic vision.
The synthesizing allusion to figures from the religious myths of Egyptian
and Greek antiquity, Judaism and Christianity is meant to extend the
ramifications of the “multiform,” “divining eyes” of the Yoruba oracu-
lar deity Ifa/Orunmila. Yet the poem is paradoxically deeply rooted in
specifically Yoruba creation myths, Yoruba aetiological legends of the
emergence of historic social and cultural forms, especially of agriculture
from pre-sedentary, migratory social formations; it cryptically narrates
the coming of the iron age to West Africa, and the rise and fall of cults
associated with specific deities and their associated social power. Part
of the achievement of this poem is to have teased out of these creation
myths and migration legends of the Yoruba people universally general-
izable spiritual and psychological aspirations and values. Of the latter,
the most important are the perpetual yearnings for union between the
human and the divine, matter and spirit, and the dialectical interpene-
tration of the partial and the whole, the fragment and the totality. This
is inherent in the myths narrated in the poem of Ogun’s forging of the
implements with which to clear vast primal growths so the gods could be
reunited with mankind; in this we see the scrupulous anachronism of the