A Quixote Against the Unreal Enemy

Windmills & mounted hostilities
Riding down down down
Roused, a dream in the rood
Will charge the enlarged enmity

The face you face the frame
That rises from a script,
The sight you slight the overwhelm
Whose image/Nation melts the native pots

So written from the margins
So misread from the centres

The translated identities still afloat
Have beaten ploughshares back into swords
Of raving knighthood in the kingdom-gone
A Quixote against the unreal enemy

The virtual victories stalking the last bastions
The nextness always, all ways
Will stop at the same beginning
The style the man the nation

Obododimma Oha teaches Stylistics, Semiotics, and Creative Writing in the Department of English at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His poems have appeared in Otoliths, Shadowtrain, Postcolonial Text, Portal, African Writing Online, Sentinel Poetry Online, and several literary anthologies.