Agere Ifa

into her bird-footed bowl
the diviner once dropped
16 sacred palm nuts

perhaps, then, he saw me, now
unfurling her from tissue paper
like a gift
in a strip-lit room

imagine him exhaling slowly and warmly
centuries ago
here, where I blow dust from her ridges

I dip and lift her
sense an almost lightness

smooth my thumbs
over carved shoulders
and breasts darkened with palm oil and soot
turn the soles of her feet skywards

tilt her head this way then that

she is smaller than a newborn
kneeling before deities who foretold disaster
and whispered the warnings of ancestors long dead

the diviner saw all
saw that her arrowed amulet
and sickle-shaped headdress
her cheeks chiselled by gills
and thin hip chain
could not stop lost things

he prophesised drifting
and the slow sound of splintering wood

there is room in her bowl for millennia
and all the blessed wisdom of Orunmila

yet here she is
sealed in a plastic box and catalogued on a high shelf
between some fat-bellied pots
and a handful of dodo bones

- Alix Scott-Martin