Red Breath
After bodies were rolled
and warm bloods turned cold
I watched all these red serpentine
out of the body of a young boy
into this dry, cursed land
where mad men, and marauder bands
unsheathed their swords,
for an aimless cause.
I know these men suckled darkness
from their mother’s breasts
For they know not the hows of peace nor rest
Still, do not ask me who was right or wrong,
Do not ask, too, how Armageddon began
Or how war first broke out in heaven —
I am no Michael!
I am just a boy who has seen
other boys like me
shape-shifted into a
higgledy-piggledy mountain of
fleshly husks
And mama has seen them too,
And mama fears I’ll be another farmer
Reduced into manure
——
Undoing
Segun told me how his mother’s face was calligraphed with dark scars. He said his
father was the disturbed artist. Toxicity, I
am told, is painting without looking at the
canvas. Not due to mastery, but oblivion. This is how Segun’s father was
trained by his own father. And now, Segun receives the same training:
“always put a woman in her place.
one wrong talk and she must walk on fiery coals.”
It has been years now and Segun’s love for his wife has lasted longer than the
Pyramids. At the cinema tonight,
Look at how he worships his wife with his
hands like a goddess he reveres,
An art he besots. Look—
look at how a man is undoing his father’s whorls from his blood.
——
Poetry (c) Sosy Imafidon
Image: MS Co-Pilot AI remixed
Sosy Imafidon, yet again, proves his steadfast position as a keen observer of his Afro-social niche. His pieces revolve in the thin vortex of life’s deepest psychotic evolutions, aptly laden with wit and empathy, truth and sensitivity. These pieces read like sunflowers lining a broken gravestone.