Ókólí Stephen Nonso // Where the Road Bends, the Bone Remembers (for Biafra, written in the mouth of silence) // Poetry
Ókólí Stephen Nonso
Where the Road Bends, the Bone Remembers
(for Biafra, written in the mouth of silence)
They said the war was brief, but how do you measure the length of a silence that keeps echoing in the ribs of the dead? The wind still limps through Umuahia like an old soldier, dragging the scent of cassava dust, blood & forgotten names. In the East, the soil remembers. It remembers every child born with hunger in their hair and salt for blood. Biafra was not just a dream; it was a hunger that learned to walk. A map drawn in spilled oil & prayers that never made it past the throat.
We did not die. We became metaphors. We became proverbs. Uzu amaghi akwu na agha ewelu ya eme ogu, the blacksmith who doesn’t know there’s war, uses his anvil for battle. & so we did. Our mouths, battlegrounds. Our stories, bullets. Our songs, smoke. Children danced in airports where food never landed, their bellies making sounds like talking drums, their eyes full of the type of light that precedes death. The sky closed its throat. Even rain would not betray the blockade.
You see, the thing about war is that it never ends where the guns stop. It lingers in yam barns that never reopen, in songs mothers dare not sing. It stays in the smell of powdered milk from Canada that came too late. & in the faces of the unburied. Have you seen an Igbo man cry without water? That is how we mourn. Dry. Deep. With dust on our tongues. Because when the sun sets on the house of the tortoise, he carries it in his shell.
I was born years after, but I carry the war like a secret name. My mother still cooks too much rice on Independence Day, not out of patriotism, but defiance. Jiri obi gi gbaa mmiri, boil water with your heart. That’s how they survived. That’s how we remember. They cooked with saltless tears, seasoned their grief with quiet. My uncle still refuses to talk about the nights in Oji River. He says some memories do not want light. Some memories want to be left alone in the bush, humming like crickets before an ambush.
We were not defeated. No. We were s c a t t e r e d. Like a broken kolanut thrown to the four winds. But every seed knows the direction of home. We are coming back, not in flags, but in voices. In literature. In songs that refuse silence. In proverbs. In children who write history in the margins of their poems.
& maybe that’s why I’m here. Writing. Not as a witness, but as an echo. Not to tell the story clean, but to carry the stain with reverence. Egbe bere, ugo bere, let the eagle perch, let the vulture perch. But when one says the other should not, may its wings wither. Biafra was our perching. & though the eagle fell, it fell with its eyes open.
•
Ókólí Stephen Nonso (he/him) is a Nigerian writer whose poems have appeared in Feral Journal, Ebedi Review, Ngiga Review, Brittle Paper, The Shallow Tales Review, African Writer, Adelaide Literary Magazine (New York), Olney Magazine, Tuck Magazine, Ofi Press, and elsewhere. His short fiction has been featured in The Best of African Literary Magazine and several national and international anthologies.
He is the 2024 winner of the Muse Journal Award for Best Literary Artist of the Year and a joint winner of the May 2020 Poets in Nigeria (PIN) 10-Day Poetry Challenge. His other honors include first runner-up in the Fresh Voice Foundation Poetry Contest and third prize in the Akuko Magazine Inaugural Prize for Poetry (2021). In 2024, he was also shortlisted for the Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature. His poem Transcript will be exhibited at the University of California, Berkeley, in September 2025.
In recognition of his growing literary impact, he was profiled in Who’s Who of Emerging Writers 2021 by Sweetycat Press.
Say hello on Twitter: @OkoliStephen7.