THIS CROSS ON THE MORROW

The cruet has no place,
these tasteless morsels are well enough.
Early beams crash into hungry belches,
denting the august return of day.
Morn prayer is skirted, even the priests.
Fathers conjure by sills with mean leans;
broken- like the obstreperous grounds
where children played, chanting vigorous colloquials.

A dim glow licks the earthen; but
it refuses to clang, too tired to clang.
Memories are the dying embers
drifting on time. A few gods
went downstream and painted this frame
in blood red to our hearing.
Inconsequential psyches
rot the essence of  prophecies foretold.

Now we cup our freedom, to quell;
the haunting drone of shriveled dreams
birthed in those pullulated days,
the recollection of rubbles
of crumbled sweat,
gnawing time- ticking at our innate.
We pour -libation no longer.

The vista crawls out to sight,
treads ghostly behind the ears,
white and virgin.
Intentions do not soil the sweet air
that dabs on the throat.
The bloodless scent green
that glows as the sun blesses.
The picture of a dream that lives
and walks beside frith-
only cessation could spoil.

It dies as it begs; a swig down throat.

———-

A LOST CITY

These days I itch for lost communion,
I rummage my wit for morsels
soaked in stentorian saga
-traversed down the epochs.

Sinews are stony by reason
of the time. Yet a love stirs
deep within the abstruseness,
couched beneath the mayhem,
empathy for folk.

I veer my ears- when the light recoils
at the feel of dusk into a husk
of darkness-
to liquid wisdom that bleeds from the rock.

Lingering at the river bank,
I discerned the intangible blear
from which the concentric cycle
of spirits spiral.

I have seen at the hunter’s dance;
bullets spit into mortal gut,
like cud, come up to the mouth
and spew into a torrent of festivals.

I have sat in the midst of eons and solons
and beheld a rushing generation
stumbling on its heels.

I once heeded the voices
that echoed in the dell,
“We are the liquid that collect
where giant footsteps trod,
the Sun of time parches us all away”.

Now I stand destitute-
bereft of those fellowships-
of substance, prudence and the tang
of luscious venison.

———-
Poems: Adebayo Temitope
Image: Vladimir Agafonkin via Flickr