Osundu

The wind of your father’s voice, the one that blew you high with promises of undiscovered places in the world. You sat stoning the future of sparrows, you held a

lariat, preyed another animal for an experiment of cruelty. Thirsty minds, Awelewa called your crew “fierce”, the next day, she was a silent song. Your house, a feast, aunties mixing into spices. You were a nightingale that misused the body of joy, You woke

& something kissed you in the face, the day It stopped was the day your mother died. An army of drunk men march past their own consciousness, you picked your father broken, fed him sleep & teach him forgetfulness.

Today is your birthday, he sings from a precipice of fine lyrics, but all you hear is a grave. In some dreams, you think waking a disaster, in some, you are Abel, pricking little

lobsters in green ponds, hiss when a boy tongues of the strawberry sky, the train blocking the view of the other side.

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In Which There Is A Common Tongue

In a blind city, we, veterans of road, God’s offerings to dead places, squeeze sand into our palms as ritual, as if to say; lord, keep us from the violence of water. A wet body leads us through the flood near the place where a barren tree labors the city’s scars & a bat perches on the soft body of wind. A woman bursts out an empty family house where a boy bleeds & hides his blood into night, as if to say- body listen, darkness too is a path to life. An electronic teddy sings to a broken vase & they said it’s a jinnee, they said every Gomorrah here starves of redemption, even the nearby villages spanked by noises of wounded warriors. At the riverbank, some girls queue for the fortune of oyster, strange men in thick cloud of cigarette watch, begging for manhood & we spin through the delicacy of old cities, even where a man shouts the language of war, calling it mother tongue, & I wonder, if it’s how our rages pass on like ancestral songs.

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Poems: Fatihah Quadri Eniola

Image: mono-log on Unsplash