After Omodero David Oghenekaro’s “Where The Poem Begins”

It’s the frequent & lousy nightmares that wear me down
into the thought of my demised father; a truth crystallising
I never yearn to let my lines agonized like burning bones which I do not own,
as it once did after my grandfather’s ancestral expedition to becoming lineage of stars
How do I envision the condition of my eyes, when its voodoo is sacrificing tears?
I looked into my father’s eyes, I never knew it was death I saw
God! I call you with a pitch of respect in this talkative rain
like Jesus the savior, on the cross, incarnating
“Heli heli lama sabaqtani”
because I know your miracle is in progression
& I know God will never renounce me as he never renounced Jesus
The rain succumbed the flower on my father’s sepulchre into prostration,
& I asked my mother a day climbing it, if the plants too worship God?
My body is a fragile wool;
& for grief to be the adornments the world will offer me is sheer cruelty
When grief is a wildfire that could burn my tongue
It’s the phobia of losing someone that I first mastered at my cradle like Muhammad
the day I begin to decipher the land is skilled
at swallowing living things and exhuming dead things
Imagine, a small bird flies arrogantly in the rendezvous rain
& opines that singing melodiously in the rain has made her conqueror of grief,
Happiness has been a stepping stone to people’s pride
The electric wire electrocuted the bird & the sky became silent
I whisper how much I loathe grief in my seclusion during Ramadan
& my body fret like a sundry mat set ablazed.
Do not pronounce me a boy, when I have behold what old men had espy
Belief me, I have espy death in our house and I vanish like a shadow cuddling a body
After sighting the flash of light penetrating from the sun
I am too naive to see a ghost in my dream that I resurrected back to life
Tell me, am I not too juvenile to sacrifice a father at the age of Eleven?
when I abruptly knew nothing about the intricacies of life
& My heart is a grieving sea, screaming of pain,
God knows I am younger than my grief and I know it too
& this is where grief begins to unfold.

 

Photo by Hanniel Yakubu on Unsplash