Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment “Conversations at night with a cockroach” is a long poem of eighteen
stanzas which combines lyric, dramatic and narrative poetic modes.
In external form, the poem is structured by a conventional strope-
antistrophe dialogical interchange wherein the poet (the voice in the
strophe) speaks the stanzas which recall the idealistic, utopian attempts
of his generation to forge a just, cohesive social order out of the diverse,
plural communities making up his newly independent nation, and the in-
truder cockroach in his prison cell speaks the stanzas recalling the forces
which not only thwarted those efforts but are now consolidating and ex-
panding their reign of terror and mediocrity (antistrophe). Typical of this
pattern is the following exchange between one long stanzaic “strophe”
and two short refrains of “antistrophe” from the opening section of the
poem:
(Strophe)
In that year’s crucible we sought
To force impurities in nationweal
Belly-up, heat-drawn by fires
Of truth. In that year’s crucible
We sought to cleanse the faulted lodes
To raise new dwellings pillared on crags
Washed by mountain streams; to reach
Hands around Kaura hills, beyond
Obudu ranges, to dance on rockhills
Through Idanre. We sought to speak
Each to each in accents of trust
Dispersing ancient mists in clean breezes
To clear the path of lowland barriers
Forge new realities, free our earth
Of distorting shadows cast by old
And modern necromancers. No more
Rose cry and purpose, no more the fences
Of deceit, no more perpetuity
Of ancient wrongs
(Antistrophe)
But we were wise to portents, tuned
As tinsel vanes to the dread approach
Of the visitation. And while the rumble yet
Was far, we closed, we spread tentacles.
We knew the tread and heard
The gathering heartbeat of the cyclone heart
And quick our hands to forge coalitions new
Of tried corruptions, East to West, North to South.