Girlhood Definition
To be a girl is to chisel your body,
& to be careful before it becomes an amoeba
because mother calls me a rebirth of her mother’s death
The other night, mother carved three figurines on my palms,
She called it my family tree & named the smallest after me.
Now, I understand better as she was an artifact
of father’s unbridled fist each night.
& the only inheritance I could have was the lesson
of pain being grafted into us, till it fits our physique.
To be a girl, is me dissecting my heart
into four unequal fragments.
1, a residue for my father’s disgust.
2, an inheritance of my mother’s pain.
3, for the man I loved, but it’s a taboo to love me back.
4, a communion with the dirges of women in my genealogy, who were songbirds who seemed to stray from beauty & now finding the route back there.
—–
Watermark
My body is an inheritance/ watermarked with the names of the men of my clan/ whose boyhood rights were translated into manhood// & boys like me count our days with a prayer for a miracle/ on some other days/ our tears are clothed with a plea for mercy/ if we came as offences// A miracle here/ is that may the weight on our skins not suppress us.
—–
Intercession
I remould my country as a prayer:
On my tongue is a million people floating,
& like my neighbour’s children, thousands drowning,
Resaying, I mean, finding answers on how to survive a sea.
& their naivety that humans have no gills is not forgiven here.
I tell you, to love them,
is to sympathize with them,
to sympathize with them is to have their confusion
attracted to you, like a magnet.
Till you become a confused lover,
finding the help that slipped off your hands.
& like them, it will drown.
I fashion my tongue in prayer to God.
& I weigh it, by the arms (without gills) it outstretches.
—–
Poetry (c) Victor Obukata
Image: Dall-E remixed