Calls by Promenades of Answers

In this exclusive preview of Ndubuisi Martins’ forthcoming collection, Calls by Promenades of Answers (2025), ArtisansQuill is honoured to follow Martins as his expansive and incisive gaze invokes the memory of EndSars, ploughs the cut on the soul of a black boy in Prague newly acquainted with what it means to be different, and bemoan the mangling of a girl’s innocence.

Together, the three poems gesture at the range and urgency of a poet whose answers are never singular, but always refracted through promenades of experience.

Wreck & Wreath for Lekki

At Lekkigate: 7.45 p.m., 20.10.20,

you remember the stained flag

and flip through the night

that left horror and denials at dawning dusk.

The placid gate, scene of horror &

there’s the silence after the wraith & darkness

on the stained green. white. and then red. scar, not colour.

Reports came, Lekkigate: CCTV off,

and so descend the Khaks, zombies around squatting,

kneeling mass of youths, the rest scene is a permanent cache

of blood; the blood of penitent heads asking to live

but bowed in plastic silence.

So, denials flagged through the dailies: a city of blood,

trail of blood, mopped for the morning

must not see the black eyes of night.

Days later, months after, tribunals, tributary sittings,

sessions after sessions; double-edged blames

and lies change cloaks, lies loud and truth tarry on the sidelines.

And this Naija mockery mints low logic

for pale ashes never look fluid like the colour of dawn, of day.

The night is its skin, a trail of ruin, a daredevil,

the Instagram Live leaked it, but is the hush not now a chemical end?

Years after, till amnesia bites all, again,

ENDSARS is a fiction

and Lekki is the farce of a country in search of its flag

in the carcasses of its future.

Discovering the dark light of a city

At home, Eno’s son now seeks the light in his black body

after Kuzak denied him love and friendship,

blew off the candle of purity, stopped him

from joining other kids in white playfields.

In biting snow breaks, binarism set early as harsh sun

as though it is hot summer. In Prague, Eno is Black

for Kuzak called him so.

Children hardly know separated pairs,

but Eno’s son now knows night and day as people in flesh.

In the school, light and dark, inseparable from his head,

went through chromatography in the nursery of boys

too small for hate chinks.

Sudden words shine a bleak light in the cruelty of color in Prague,

light bit him grey. Grief and silence hit harder

than the clatter at boys’ playgrounds back in Ibadan.

Max’s head is gabled in questions—

furrows of answers lit with new doubts and daggers.

Sleight hands of whiteness across the face

because the space is racial—

the light of the dark knowing scars his pupils

and widens his gaze.

Singing mantis

One anonymous girl has the song,

and she, like her mother,

once sang in the noon-drizzle of sun-brushes.

The next privileged morning, unusually happy and gay,

yesterday returned to her, in catacombs that

pierced her composure, the skin peels.

The girl held up her scream, silently gassed,

as pain sometimes hides its victim in public spaces

when she is arm-twisted to dot her dummies.

She will return to burn the candle

in the dead of night that opens her pains,

spread them across the face of sea weeds.

And the spread of song hits the castle of silence,

but the world does not hear her bruised lyrics,

deafness is poetics to choose in throes of nights.

No one has the nerve to make beam rays

from tears gathered through dinghies

the ones that resist light against night.

She pitched her mother’s fate from glasses

broken in the midst of shouts and silences,

the answers night gifts to desolate weaverbirds.

Those days, she cried, sang to nightliers listened

to by hyenas-audience of the wild who absorb noises

re-chewed meaning as ruminant cuds do.

The hyenas know that night is god,

it needs the propitiation of virgin songs

and that of many homeless girls like this one.

From Calls by Promenades of Answers (forthcoming, 2025). Published with permission of the author.