A SONG OF COLOURS

Listen,
pay attention to your bones screaming for help because they are weary.

You have carried your grandfather’s shame under your skin for too long
and your body is tired of living in a room full of shadows of memories that won’t die.

Repeat after me:
history is not a prison,
a name is not a curse,
destiny is not a picture of the past hanging on the wall, covered in dust.

I think if you wanted it:
you could carve a rainbow on the canvas of the future,
ride on the wings of hope to a land where dreams come alive,
drive a hole through the cocoon of grief life has made you
and break into a butterfly of happiness.

I think if you wanted it:
you could burn silence on the lips of men who ever dared
to whisper impossible into your ears,
sing a song of colours into the darkness
and watch shame dissolve into a volcano.

If you wanted it,
if you really wanted it.

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INTROSPECTION(Songs for Plath)

I
My heart is a tomb where hope comes to live.
I go to parties of happiness to breathe,
I inhale all the light around me
and leave the parties when it gets dark,
too dark for men to see
without stumbling into sadness.
Too dark to feel for lighters that lift souls of men high.
I watch their fears colliding from a distance,
I giggle.

II
On quiet days
when there are no songs left in my lungs,
I write.
I like to write stories of women that died
while embracing life-
firmly,
women we thought had too much of her in them
but we never cared to look beneath their skins.
On autopsy,
the pathologist said he found castles living inside them,
castles that echoed whispers.

III
There are nights when I dream;
I am a bird,
carrying happiness within my beak
flying towards a nest I do not know.
I never get home.
An angry storm breaks my beak into two,
happiness dissolves into a stream of darkness.
I wake up screaming.
Sweating.

——————–

© Afolabi Boluwatife
Image: Ilya Haykinson via Flickr (modified)