A Geek's Life

Navidrome on my home server might be the gift that keeps giving. In today’s instalment, I stumbled on Chris Abani’s TED Talk from 2008, saved from the podcast in iTunes, and on to my USB HDD where it has sat till a few days ago.

It is a deeply emotive talk, one which explores humanity and stories (of difficult times) including the Nigerian Civil war and also the not so great days of activism under military rule. He closes, fittingly, by reading from Lucile Clifton’s Libation, a poem firmly on my list of favourites.

It is a weighty poem, describing a ritual libation – pouring gin into the earth and salt which is a long standing tradition for honouring the dead. There is a tongue pushing through a hole where a tooth (lost to a brutal beating, or to decay?) would be, which ends up being a symbol of weightier lost things: land, house, wife, son, daughter.

The old man is imagined crying unseen, out of the sight of the overseer, but in this poured libation centuries later he is recognised:

this offering
is for you old man;
this salty ground,
this gin.

Selah.