Dissecting Sky storm from the collection of poems, Wild Peaches

Yinka Olatunbosun

Fagbolahan Eugene Machado’s Sky storm is a poem of wreckage and quiet insurrection, a work that does not merely document collapse but makes us feel its weight in the bones of language itself. The poem’s title gestures toward more than mere destruction—it invokes a gathering force, an elemental upheaval that is both natural and man-made, as though the failure of governance and the rot of infrastructure have conspired with the heavens in a shared indictment.

The opening stanza establishes the poem’s sonic and thematic terrain: “The streets speak in tongues of rust, / gullies groan where roads ran.” The personification of streets, the invocation of rust as a language, immediately signals a world in which decay has its own agency. The juxtaposition of movement and stasis—roads that once “ran” now lost to gullies—illustrates not only infrastructural degradation but historical betrayal. The choice of choke in the third line, describing the fate of the clock-tower, extends this motif; it is not merely dust settling, but a suffocation of time itself, a nation stalled.

The second stanza sharpens its critique, shifting its gaze from environment to power: “Parliament swells with swollen hands, / fat with echoes of stolen yam.” The doubling of swollen is not accidental—its repetition amplifies the grotesque, reinforcing an image of excess and dysfunction. That the parliament is not just corrupt but physically swollen conjures the imagery of disease, of a body politic that has gorged itself to the point of grotesque dysfunction. The reference to stolen yam is particularly resonant, drawing from the lexicon of Nigerian political satire where food is a metonym for stolen resources. The stanza’s final image, “tossing coins into the grave of dawn,” is devastating in its implications—the ruling class does not merely squander wealth but performs empty gestures of charity, feeding ruin rather than renewal.

The third stanza moves into ecological imagery, mirroring political devastation in the
language of environmental collapse: “The river, once a silver hymn, / coughs up fish with belly wounds.” Here, Machado employs stark contrast between past and present. The river as hymn evokes a previous harmony, a natural order that has been defiled. The
verb coughs anthropomorphizes the waterway, linking it to disease, as though the river itself is afflicted by the toxins of governance. The belly wounds of the fish are not just physical but metaphorical, recalling the belly of the nation—empty, violated, incapable of sustaining life. The land is next described as a widow, wrapped in weeds—a precise and cutting metaphor, transforming the nation into one left bereaved, abandoned by those meant to tend it.

Yet Skystorm does not end in absolute despair. The final stanza offers a shift—subtle, but significant. A boy, “barefoot and bright-eyed,” draws the sun, an act that, though fragile, suggests a refusal to submit to ruin. A woman’s song—a relic of the past—becomes an ember in the dark. Here, Machado engages in what can only be described as an aesthetic of resistance. These figures, though small, push against the inertia of decline. The closing image—“a seed clenches its fist”—is the poem’s most defiant moment. The metaphor transforms the seed from a passive object into an agent of uprising. This is no patient waiting; it is preparation, potential energy coiled beneath the cracked surface.

Machado’s Skystorm is a masterful work of compression, wielding precise diction and controlled imagery to evoke an entire world teetering between disintegration and endurance. The poem employs personification to give decay an active role, juxtaposition to contrast past vitality with present ruin, and repetition to underscore excess and stagnation. What makes the work particularly compelling is its tonal discipline—it does not indulge in melodrama, nor does it offer facile optimism. Instead, it leaves us suspended in the charged space between ruin and revolt, where a clenched fist beneath the soil may yet split the earth open.