Jakky Bankong Obi - October 2025

Silver Branch series

Jakki Bankong-Obi

Jakky Bankong-Obi is a poet from Kakwe-Beebo, a village on the corridors of the Cross River Rainforest in southeastern Nigeria. Her chapbook 'What Still Yields' was chosen by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for publication in the New-Generation African Poets box sets, by Akashic Books and APBF (Spring/Summer 2022). Jakky is a Media Consultant and Editor-in-Chief at Pepper Coast Literary, Curator at Poetry Sango-Ota and Co-Editor at Ice Floe Press. Her work is forthcoming and in the Prairie Schooner, The Kalahari Review, Gutter Magazine, The Poetry Review, Pidgeonholes and Memento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry etc. Jakky is on twitter as @jakkybeefive.

the making of sweet trees

the droning whirr of the swarm has abandoned

the bower and still i think of you after all this time.

it’s raining. the honey glaze of wood rot runs down

the bark. hollowed logs are the residual mosaic of

summery dalliances and sweetness. how the past clings

to its natural history of nostalgia. mourning doves cooing

for love among the branchlets. there are things i still want

to confess when i think of you. at dusk, mist settles on

the leaves like crystals. a bioluminescence of click beetles

is the ghost of longing as new rains sink into the dark

geologies of former apiaries and the heart

- wood hums.

tropical gothic in the birthing ward

for max o.

“love is a ruthless god.” – co-star, app notification 12/28/2024.

the cry of the galago sounds an omen into the frigid harmattan

night. winged secrets shivering in the dark-wild, scatter tree-

waves in vague brush-rustle, suggesting spectral

hostilities. but when the deep convulses settle, you

know the afterlife roosts in feral silences,

swooping otherworldly in lupine shadows.

a grave benediction ghosting

where the mystique tracks solitary

in lapses of infants’ cries soothed into

nesting.

cavernous in the black heart of nothing,

sound we know springs from the memorious

maw misbegotten in beggared

echoes of thought.

ruined translations of another world and whatever

strange language whittles into tongue as newborn prayers.

is the world given form as your first cry.

my little dart.

little dart made flesh in love.

lavender boon

lavender infuses every dawn

with a prime devotion of spores.

spider-silk on spindly stalks—

they are the interstices of crossroads

& boon, longitudinal in summer, vestal

like the sadness of early harmattan, boding.

clairvoyants of a flora language eternally

dispersing into a future turfed with the last

colours of autumnal desire. each leaf

lit by an inner flame. amaranthine fire.

lake picnic

for isang.

it’s hard to trust sweets, i tell him / before dinner: not the ruined palate,

but glossy wrappers

corsages with veiled intent. the first time by the lake it was quiet but i was not

content / the dusky

afterglow of depleted days says my mind / it’s not the evening’s fault. i wanted

to try & not return

hollow. all the times it dewed, all the times it rippled, all

the times we pined.

the heart is not an empty well/ every open mouth was made

to be filled/take off the gag

& taste: you make me crave caramel, satin, musk. so lay out the feast,

let’s clean slake.

nothing waits for us

ama says nothing waits for us. not the gardens. groves.

not even these graves. already, october lapses into the last tendrils

of birdsongs wisping the world in aerial approximations of yearning. shifts

and sundry clouds mist to a stippling horizon as flame

-throwers and wild asters rust. colours in earthy stripes where

harmattan turns ruinous. all the blooming frocked in umbral glaze

each unravel, something that slips season to season, now the afterlife

stacks in the delicate as late ecologies of lichen, weissia-moss, army-olive,

bittering the heart until sour. until poison, seeding the whole coliseum of

grain. until all the fields wither to wait nothingness after

nothingness and us, what do we hope to save after a lifetime

of sowing perennials, futures,

these buried bones in the sand,

sifting, dreaming?

ideograms for the hawk-moth and for the aftermath fire

i. dusk is something to wallow in.

ii. antlers on a hilltop, sunned and bifurcating

iii. scry of crow on the withering branch.

iv. black shadows feathering secret rendezvous with home.

v. the gloaming, a masque headdress: relic of a time honored ritual of uncovering.

vi. audience of crickets in the underbrush

vii. whatever sees us, sees us.

viii. deep ancestral hour of night.

xiv. a felled log

x. brush of mushroom beside

xi. longing unmakes.

xii. haunt of charcoal on ochre skin

xiii. dancing under the full moon

xiv. lightning strikes three times

xv. a thousand fires kindle and rage.

xvi lovers learn the shape of desire.

xvii. secret: body crumbles at the slightest touch.

xviii. a moth’s chitinous wing

xix arcs you into open flame.

xx. blurring the lines of luminance and shatter.

(First published in the summer issue of the poetry review, 2022)

edge music of the peninsular waves

(marina, calabar.)

sirrocco grates rampant gusts of biting songs against the shore.

bilious, viscera euphoria spewing into the waterfront. celestial

score, an old god’s bellow from strange oceanic storms we sometimes

repudiate hankering for lighter muses. aped in feline rasp and owl

screech, each note tangles rough with the waves’ wild breaking.

witterung at mind’s edge. a dark susurrus fraying the margins of

a watery world without end.

summer in lake chad

october winds into the lake’s basin and the leaves retreat to safety. the soil, prismatic and filigreed as an ache, familiar enough to expect it. and because no one stops time in the endoheric, the sun unsprings september brown. and browning still, fields of elephant grass, papyri and reed pickle, then vanish in the wilt. heatstroked, baobab and acacia bark break, offload to wax then congeal. remember everything begins with optimism. in the mother tongue there are seven possible translations for any tree. it’s true we were once a forest. but we never tried hard enough. plundering its ceaseless vehemence, the heat crowns everything in petaled fire. nothing left to green. or extant. not water, oil or salt. meaning nothing we could keep on the body prevails. and as the scarcity eventuates, the topography leaches. then fossils. laid bare, the bones rattle and call out to their bygone history. and the answer is a thirsty throat in the mouth of a summer once restless with other nestings.

(First published in reliquiae journal,

mortal flares

flamethrowers rut all season long and everything’s a flare

of crimson hearts, verdant in sundew early may

foments with longing.

garish muster, redbud clusters, cercis cultivar

overbright in ornamental porticoes more real

than fire dreaming. alight,

we meet in the heady cartography of posies

to confirm, for now, petals are a divining

instrument, desire is a culling. bleeding-red

flowers deep budding in the ravine

-neck. we kiss in the aegis of bramble

and pine so tender the blooming aches

in the withering of words

of words.

last lights and coquetries

dusk tosses into naked fields like wild

-fires. a worship of palms, the cape’s horde

warbles in easter groves as everything alters and

the colours of the horizon die and take away light.

adagio of pines. april thrushes in the citrusy tarmacs

of the world. concerts of trumpet’ hoppers, passerines

in head-high grass relishing rituals of freefall and

ascension. a devotion of thalli chorusing small vespers

of the gloaming where the plot thickens with geraniums

and ixora clusters. sweetness fledgling in the crowning

dark as roving plovers, lovers, linger

over last lights and coquetries.

epiphany

sometimes on the cusp

of a tropical storm, as the sun

floats to shelter, stealing

from cloud to cloud, she

finds a slit in space, drips

tints of golden light and

spotlights on the shape of

things, highlights; slant of line,

curve in form. suddenly,

the unveiling of a new vista,

in old and familiar places.

say epiphany.

rewilding grief

after years of pretending you’re not dead, i visit your grave and find mourning doves braving the grim portent of rooks in the old burial grounds. the day is funereal and plagued by the typical draught of any sepulchral morning. overcast. monsoon melancholia. the grief of evergreens in the bleak soughing of wind through wastrel boughs. drawling harmonies of a wild ache in willow and neem. green reverberations in writhing reliquaries rebound with traces of sound set to an old grief. grief of cities. grief of fields. grief of generations of blooming meadows as sad necropolises of black hellebores, gloomy baccaras, lolling wisterias in lenten palls. darkening wreathes of cattails, phragmite and seething walls of grim nettles where already summer sleuths new shoots in the rot. the primordial rising again and again.

overcast particulars

sad forever. anecdotal rainfall and overcast

particularities with details of the city in greige,

glazed. a field, all sward and jade gleam, is

an impeccable sullen posy outside. on certain days,

you can see the finer points of a possible extinction

baiting the blades. dances with hard winds, a woman

brings in the draught, fetching rainwater collected in

funereal basins.

light leaves the sky in intricacies of limns.

spasms of cloud-wings, swirling after-winds.

a grand conspiracy of weathering all day.

searching for golden-orbs at first light

the other is multiple and on the basis of this new questions arise.

― simone de beauvoir.

in the first light of the summer

cresting, swift jays carol and peaching yarrows convoke.

harmattan. slight fog wings down the blotted path smoke

-screening the tack. from realms we have no business discerning,

deadal dust on desolate mounds swell, pursuant to a clemency

of fortunes,

nine and naïve, we trudge blindly

through ground-sweeping plantain spires, following sentimental

signals of traditions into a circuitry of dreaming trees corralled in

silk-work. golden-orbs and webbed raptures. laced interstices,

we found their dragnet-cobwebs mazed and latticed in gaudy

metaphors of finest spinner architecture.

they are not born

in this quarry, but living the lifecycles and phases, of course, traces

ideographs in blooded memory. marrowed to disperse in recollections of tropical

roosting, they wraith life’s ribbons in the unacred cosmos of sky and peninsular.

derelicts of artifice and artistry, haunts and haven of spectral muses, we reach for

consider the audacity of living wild.

loam in the wild inland natures

rife. dark. organ-blood tinged, crux in the denser capillaries striating

distal matter. your mud-flats, silent courses pelt the delta with liquid

ore, ferrous, wherever the sepulchral sea abbeys amidst agons

of inland natures. wild in the umbral current of the heart

and tenderness.

About my writing:

I write to investigate liminality, transformation, thresholds, portals of pivots in ordinariness and fugue. I’m fascinated by the idea of possibility that lies in-betweenness and wells of potential inherent in things. My primary sources of imagery are nature, symbolism, and myth. Flowers, rainforests, small deities of aphids and bees, crossroad places, turns of seasons, shadowed states and habitats straddling ways of being etc, feature quite frequently in my poems.

I’m generally a slow writer and also don’t know where the poems are going to go. But I trust that if I come to the writing with sincerity and a willingness to do the work, my muse and I can work something out. Like every other writer, reading incites my writing more than anything else. Immersing myself in words, experiencing the way other people craft language and being able to catch a glimpse of how other people perceive or translate the world, inspires me.

Jakky Bankong-Obi, October, 2025.