Mispronounced, surely; I suspected that the languid Enugu
tongue had played fast and loose, as usual, with the syllables,
and so, for many years, I had taken it to be “Milking Hill”—
dedicated simply to the fetching of milk from cows.
But no pastoral ruminants here except the potbellied goats
who look twice before capering across the village roads.
Milliken’s Hill, a white man’s memorial. Christened seventy years
or so ago after the colonial holdover who dynamite-blasted the rock
to carve out the lean road that unwinds in a tight spiral round
the coalhearted hills. So the hilltop prince told me. Seventy years
later, warranty expired, as these things do, the old road don give out,
the damp sand underneath crumbling and taking the coal tar with it.
I dare to look off the unrailed cliff, to the depths of it, to see for myself
past the very tops of untapped raffia palms and eucalypti and the cell
towers and zinc-roofed houses shelved on neighboring hills. This valley
is layered over by soft mist, undertoned by the bluegreen of the leaf-
crowded mountain, the eye-watering ochre of the highlife evening.
Mma bu nkwukwu. Looking now off Milliken Hill, I see, in my wandering
mind’s eye, only the cackling monkeys deep within, who will go to mock
later the humble people keeping vigil at altars on a holier rock,
as if they know better—now, nevertheless, they swing about and decry
the burnt-out frames of commercial passenger buses, fallen off the brink
with so many nameless bones. Fewer, though, than you would think;
my conveyor, old-reliable Coal City Cab, is righted just in time, having
digressed abruptly to avoid headlong death; screeching out of nowhere
at two hundred and twenty kilometers an hour, tumbling along
like these lines, the would-be manslaughterer with failing brakes.

poetry-magazineReverie on Milliken Hill

Reverie on Milliken Hill