Remi Raji

Language: english

Salutation

I come gently
Like the evening rain

I come in silence
Like the dews of a virgin morn

I come suddenly
Like thunder, like the rain at noon.

Rites of first tuber and leaves to you
Oh forbears of redolent words
Salute to you who ponder our ways to sunlight
Salute to you who hold pestles of songs
To the mouths of mortal wrongs.

I salute the song I salute the singer
I salute the patience of quick proverbs
I salute the craft in immortal songs
I salute the pebbles I salute the pearls...

Give my voice the sonorous strains of bitter kolas
Give my voice the slippery depths of colobus bananas
Let my eyes curve into the past
Like a sickle in the harvest of gladsome songs
Let my blood draw the picture of things
Gone, going and coming...

I come tenderly
like the full moon
among gasping stars.

I come gently like the evening rain.

Remi Raji

* 23.11.1961, Ibadan, Nigeria
lives in: Ibadan, Nigeria

Remi Raji is the pen name of Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, a Nigerian poet, scholar, literary organiser and cultural activist. Raji’s first collection of poems – A Harvest of Laughters (1997) – has won national and international recognition. A Salzburg Fellow and visiting professor and writer to a number of institutions including Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, Universities of California at Riverside and Irvine (all U.S.A.), University of Cape Town (South Africa), and Cambridge University (UK), Raji’s scholarly essays have appeared in journals including Research in African Literatures and African Literature Today. Raji has presented his poems in Africa, Europe and America. In 2005, he served as the Guest Writer to the City of Stockholm (Sweden). Raji’s works have been translated into French, German, Catalan, Swedish, Ukrainian and Latvian. He has been an “Alexander von Humboldt”-Scholar to the Humboldt University to Berlin (Germany).

Raji currently teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the Department of English of the University of Ibadan (Nigeria).

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Salutation

Translations:

Gruss