Nine is a Head with Feet Dangling: Poem by Odoh Diego Okenyodo

Nine is a Head with Feet Dangling

Odoh Diego Okenyodo

I remember him
not by his face at first,
but by the discipline of his slippers,
side by side,
as though waiting for evening prayers.

A chair had fallen.
Two feet hovered above it
still, suspended
above bathroom rubber slippers
and the red dust of harmattan morning.

We were schoolchildren at NKST*
running toward noise
the way children do
barefoot, curious, unafraid.
Busy Iyorkyaa Ako Street hardly ever shouted.
Inikpi Street preferred silence.
Makurdi** was still known as Wailomayo then.

The thatch hut crouched quietly
under harmattan light.
We thought it was fire.
But no smoke rose to the pale sky
of Shehu Shagari's 1983.

Curiosity pushed open the door
and stood on tiptoe.
There was a beam
at the centre of a conical roof.
There was a body
borrowing height from a rope.
There was a mouth slightly parted
not in speech,
not in hunger which there was a lot of;
just gravity at work.

Adults gathered.
Their whispers were louder than the wind.
They said his only child,
a girl,
had followed love
across a line her father drew.
They said the young man was not Tiv.
They said she had not sent money.
They said many things.

I was nine.
Nine does not understand tribe,
or pride,
or the weight of a father's expectation.
Nine only understands that
a man should not hang
from the middle of his own roof
while people stare.

There was chaos,
but through it all
one sentence rang clear:
"Call police!"

I don't know how I got home later.
Life has a way of continuing.
My sister's cassette player
was chewing tape softly.
UB40 filled the room,
singing a new version of a cry first carried by Bob Marley:

Lord, I've got to keep on moving…

The melody was restless.
The words were about accusation,
about hanging,
about innocence denied.

I did not yet know
what had happened in that hut.

I only knew a man
had become still
while the song insisted on motion.

Years later,
when I learned the name for what he did,
the song changed.
It was no longer just music.
It was rope and beam,
slippers and dust,
harmattan and whispers.

Even now,
whenever that chorus rises,
1983 returns
not as history,
but as a pair of neatly arranged slippers
waiting beside a fallen chair,
and a man I never knew
staying with me
longer than most friends ever could.

*The Nongo u Kristu u i Ser u sha Tar (NKST), or Universal Reformed Christian Church, a Protestant denomination in Nigeria founded in 1911 by South African missionaries in Benue State, operating extensive educational and health institutions

**Makurdi is the capital of Benue State, Nigeria.

Odoh Okenyodo
Development Communication Specialist
mobile: +2348091443322
okenyodo@gmail.com