“Directions” by Inua Ellams

 Inua Ellams

Born in Nigeria in 1984, Inua Ellams is an internationally touring poet, playwright, performer, graphic artist & designer. He is an ambassador for the Ministry of Stories and his published books of poetry include Candy Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars, Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales, The Wire-Headed Heathen, #Afterhours and The Half-God of Rainfall – an epic story in verse. His first play The 14th Tale was awarded a Fringe First at the Edinburgh International Theatre Festival and his fourth Barber Shop Chronicles sold out two runs at England’s National Theatre. He recently completed his first full poetry collection The Actual, is currently touring An Evening With An Immigrant and working on several commissions across stage and screen. In graphic art & design, online and in print, he tries to mix the old with the new, juxtaposing texture and pigment with flat colour and vector graphics. He lives and works from London, where he founded the Midnight Run, a nocturnal urban excursion. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

"Directions"

(after Billy Collins)

You know the wild bush at the back of the flat,
the one that scrapes the kitchen window,
the one that struggles for soil and water
and fails where the train tracks scar the ground?
And you know how if you leave the bush
and walk the stunted land, you come
to crossroads, paved just weeks ago:
hot tar over the flattened roots of trees,
and a squad of traffic lights, red-eyed now
stiff against the filth-stained fallen leaves?
And farther on, you know
the bruised allotments with the broken sheds
and if you go beyond that you hit
the first block of Thomas Street Estate?
Well, if you enter and ascend, and you
might need a running jump over
dank puddles into the shaking lift
that goes no further than the fourth floor,
you will eventually come to a rough rise
of stairs that reach without railings
the run-down roof as high as you can go
and a good place to stop.
The best time is late evening
when the moon fights through
drifts of fumes as you are walking,
and when you find an upturned bin
to sit on, you will be able to see
the smog pour across the city
and blur the shapes and tones
of things and you will be attacked
by the symphony of tires, airplanes,
sirens, screams, engines –
and if this is your day you might even
catch a car chase or hear a horde
of biker boys thunder-cross a bridge.
But it is tough to speak of these things
how tufts of smog enter the body
and begin to wind us down,
how the city chokes us painfully against
its chest made of secrets and fire,
how we, built of weaker things, regard
our sculpted landscape, water flowing
through pipes, the clicks of satellites
passing over clouds and the roofs
where we stand in the shudder of progress
giving ourselves to the vast outsides.
Still, text me before you set out.
Knock when you reach my door
and I will walk you as far as the tracks
with water for your travels and a hug.
I will watch after you and not turn back
to the flat till you merge
with the throngs of buses and cyclists –
heading down toward the block,
scuffing the ground with your feet

Comments

        Being Ellams the founder of  the Midnight Run, a nocturnal urban excursion in London, it is easy to imagine that he is very fond of urban life and evironments. Thus, he wrote the poem "Directions", in which he presents the picture of an urban landscape.

       The poem was written in response to Billy Collins’,  homonimous poem and it follows his  structure, tone and line breaks. But, whereas Collins’ Directions takes us into the beauty of nature: high up ‘you will eventually come to a long stone/ridge with a border of pine trees/which is as high as you can go’, Inua’s is located in an  urban setting and we are taken ‘to a rough rise/of stairs that reach without railings/the run-down roof’. Nature is there but it ‘struggles for soil and water/and fails where the train tracks scar the ground?’

           If we are lucky (‘if this is your day’) with Billy Collins we ‘might even/spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese/driving overhead toward some destination.’ It is open, free. Whereas if it is our day on Inua’s journey, ‘we might even/catch a car chase or hear a horde/of biker boys thunder-cross a bridge’. The enormity and permanence of nature with Collins is life-giving, for all its brevity, but with Inua, nature and people are transformed and conquered by ‘the shudder of progress’; this is a ‘sculpted landscape’, where the ‘moon fights through drifts of fumes’ with ‘bruised allotments’ and ‘filth-stained fallen leaves’.

           Summarizing,  as I see it, Ellams used Collins' poem as a mirror to build up the urban alter ego, with which he managed to show his admiration for urban life.