I write tributes on my palms, plait my body into
grief. Each day we live is a parting tribute to
Earth. Flowers nailed
to a cross. Wall portraits displaying dreams
and memories.
My body grows on the edge. I burn incense to
mourn the sea.
There is something that keeps bringing the living
to the dead,
but you have to read scientific forecasts on
Climate Change
before you understand why Moses broke his
compass and hung himself
half a mile into his destination. Waterbirds on
turbid lakes.
Desert expansion, the fifteenth grief. How else
do you poison your oxygen? When
we were
little, they told us that the urge to live
is more
intense when you are close to death. How come
we’ve learned
to catwalk through a warming climate and
joke about the
night you spilled talcum powder on yourself
and threw your
body into the sink? Someday I will write how the
sun now pours into my garden, erubescent,
like molten steel.
I will write about that recent flooding that washed
off my city into the news.
By God, I wish there was a Noah to turn all our doubts
into an ark.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Onyekwelu Chiwenite Kingsley is a Nigerian writer. He studies pharmacy at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka. He won the Christopher Okigbo Poetry Prize 2019 and was the 2nd prize winner of the Newman Write Contest 2017. In 2019, he was listed in the Top 100 of the Nigerian Students’ Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Kreative Diadem Annual Writing Contest.
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