Icarusting
(Verb)
Everything starts out whole from the beginning. Complete
in every form. You carried me in the womb of your palms.
Called me “china”. Placed me close to your sun— performed
the substitution.
You handling me with softness feathering the mouth.
Every tongue starts out without knowing the dialect of breaking.
To not know the grief it takes to become a thousand pieces
scattered on the floor.
Now the tongue has known by recitation the taste of ash.
This taste, this burnt love.
See the same hands that called you god committing the deicide.
Uprooting all erected altars, un-worshipping.
Everything starts out whole from the beginning.
Now you are a synthesis of tear
& tears.
Union of fragments,
& bloodied fists,
& bloodied hands.
———
Ode to Water
Because rejection can cleave the soul undone, you release mail
every waking hour.
Send them with your prayer a bitter leaf on the tongue, doves
into heaven.
Again, they come home empty,
& the tongue withers for the millionth time.
Perhaps heaven is gone.
Like a story of abundance hung by the legs,
upended,
reversed.
Everything will go backwards. & you, a perplexed observer, will see*.
A dove return into the ark, no life dangling from its mouth.
The boy in the sermon listening to the demigod, no bread, no fish.
The miracle from the navel coming undone.
Every plethora ends in a stomach of famine. Tell me,
how much drought can fill up the chasm in a chest? You search
for water forgetting the flow of the river
depends on the motion of the editor’s
hands.
But still, in these poems, you dig,
searching for water.
…..
*Line from “The Poet Dreams” by Precious Okpechi
———-
Poetry: (c) Marvellous Mmesomachi Igwe
Image: MS Co-Pilot AI remixed