Emeritus Professor of Literature and a renowned writer, Professor John Pepper Clark is dead. The poet who is a younger brother of former Federal Commissioner for Information and South-South Leader, Chief Edwin Kiagbodo Clark, passed away in the early hours of Tuesday (today).
A statement by his family reads: “The Clark-Fuludu Bekederemo family of Kiagbodo Town, Delta State, wishes to announce that Emeritus Professor of Literature and Renowned Writer, Prof. John Pepper Clark, has finally dropped his pen in the early hours of today, Tuesday, 13 October, 2020.
“Prof. J. P. Clark has paddled on to the great beyond in comfort of his wife, children and siblings, around him”.
The image of Prof. J.P. Clark ‘paddling to the great beyond’, immediately invokes many of his poems which are connected to his environment and centered mostly around the great River Nun.
One of those poems is; “Streamside Exchange”. In this poem cast as a conversation between a bird and an anxious child, J.P. Clark focuses on the child’s desire ‘to know the unknown’. The child is curious about the future and longs to see a picture of it but his hope is sealed by the bird who tells him, ‘you cannot know and should not bother, tide and market come and go, and so shall your mother’.
The bird’s answer portrays the unpredictability of the future. Tide and market here stand for time; so life come and go – in death that can come at hour.
Even though J.P Clark has paddled to the great beyond, the themes of his works on violence, protest, institutional corruption, inhumanity as well as nature will remain evergreen.
The poem:
Streamside Exchange
CHILD
River bird, river bird.
Sitting all day long
On hook over grass,
Sing to me a song
Of all that pass
And say,
Will mother come back today?
BIRD
You cannot know
And should not bother;
Tide and market come and go
And so shall your mother.