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Sally Tylecote

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The Lady

The delicate lady
Face framed in a white veil
Born into sanctity
To trip through church and shrine
The hump on her back as offering
Wrapped in her cloth
As tenderly as the baby
Pouched on its mother
Her burden like a mother’s
Is the duty of her life

Lady who the town claims
As a revelation of their normal selves
Who is not denied the innermost chambers
Who can ease the minds paralysed
By death on the roads
She sees the dead bodies swell
Pregnancies of futility
Death that like puss in a wound
Cannot be contained
Fat without food
Bloated without satisfaction
Bodies burst their innards
Upon the engulfing world

The little humped dame dances
Her feet
Daubed in the fine red earth
Churn the soil

Dancing to condone for a world
Where a woman with wound for face
Holes in place of eyes
Crouches in the shadows
Of palm fronds
Ashamed to meet the sun
With her grotesque reproach

A world where soaring above
A brilliant pair of birds
Purified in light
As blameless as the sun
Fling their bodies along
Devoted paths of beauty

Where the hunchbank below
Embraced by the town
Kneels to the greetings of her ‘husbands’

 

NOTE: The Lady, a hunchback in a Nigerian town, is, like all deformed people, sacred to a particular god. Because she is a revered part of the lives of the townspeople, she acts as a mediator between a total negation of life (that is, death) and the purest beauty (the birds). As such a mediator, she is “Embraced by the town”, and is how society in the town reconciles itself to fears like that of death on some of the most dangerous roads in the world.

Page(s) 38-39

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