Bewildering Stories welcomes...

Kufre Udeme

Kufre writes to us from southern Nigeria. He has written columns for local newspapers, and his poetry has been published very extensively in many countries of the world.

“Damp, Dampy of a Season” recounts a rainy day of a kind that might have been experienced by many living in rural areas of countries along the Bight of Benin. The local color will hold an exotic beauty for many of our readers in other parts of Africa, let alone in the rest of the world.

And yet the poem will have a strangely familiar flavor: it’s a “rainy day” poem. And rain is an archetypal experience shared by everyone the world over. Even the inhabitants of the Arctic or other desert regions must have an equivalent. Kufre shows us what it was like in Africa, near the equator, in the rainy season.

The set of refrains beginning with “bamboo bamboomy of a bed” employ a startlingly original and colorful use of language. But that, too, is strangely familiar, because it takes the poem back to the very origins of poetry itself, namely song.

Kufre Udeme’s bio sketch can be found here.

Welcome to Bewildering Stories, Kufre. We’re looking forward to other poems you’ve sent, and we hope you’ll continue to send more!