Mango Seedling

May 22, 1969

Chinua Achebe

Through glass window pane
Up a modern office block I saw, two floors below, on wide-jutting Concrete canopy a mango seedling newly sprouted Purple, two-leafed, standing on its burst Black yolk. It waved brightly to sun and wind Between rains— daily regaling itself On seed-yams, prodigally.

For how long?

How long the happy waving From precipice of rainswept sarcophagus? How long the feast on remnant flour At pot bottom?  Perhaps like the widow Of infinite faith it stood in wait For the holy man of the forest, shaggy-haired Powered for eternal replenishment.

Or else it hoped for Old Tortoise’s miraculous feast On one ever recurring dot of cocoyam Set in a large bowl of green vegetables— These days beyond fable, beyond faith?
   
Then I saw it Poised in courageous impartiality Between the primordial quarrel of Earth And Sky striving bravely to sink roots Into objectivity, mid-air in stone.

I thought the rain, prime mover To this enterprise, someday would rise in power And deliver its ward in delirious waterfall Toward earth below.

But every rainy day Little playful floods assembled on the slab, Danced, parted round its feet, United again, and passed.

It went from purple to sickly green
Before it died,  Today I see it still—
Dry, wire-thin in sun and dust of the dry months— Headstone on tiny debris of passionate courage...

To the memory of Christopher Okigbo, May 1968.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1969/may/22/mango-seedling/