Uche Ogbuji
Goddess Emeritus
Give us this day our break from bread,
The wild seed's rich imitation.
Turn back falsified goddess cereal:
Her gift today groans up excess.
When man's fifth decade was funereal,
Your turn to balance your meal books,
A lifetime's grain had been no surfeit,
Winter fitted the year's material.
But now we live no end of starch,
The wild seed's rich imitation,
Our rib cage silo's long-fixed girth,
Which now we're privileged to burst,
Thankful to the goddess of tilled earth;
Our ripe age sign of her bounty.
Let's strip her shrine even we who give
Thanks, full enough to trail unto dearth.
Bio
Uche Ogbuji was born in Calabar, Nigeria and has been a traveler ever since, living, among other places, in Egypt and England before settling in Colorado, the first place he has lived more than three years. A computer engineer and entrepreneur by trade, his chapbook, Ndewo, Colorado (Aldrich Press, 2013) is a Colorado Book Award Winner and a Westword 2015 Award Winner ("Best Environmental Poetry").