Smiles do not fall.
Photo by Orkun Azap on Unsplash.
Smiles do not fall
into our creased palms
like raindrops, yet dark clouds loom
overhead
like a catastrophe hinging off God’s little finger.
This is yet another poem about grief.
Sometimes, I wonder why we squander
so much metaphors on the breaking,
when the shards helplessly
lie around us, awaiting helping hands.
I wonder why never forgot the drowning,
the gasps for breath and
the clutches of air, even now that
we have learnt
swimming is a fallacy and
drifting with the flow is an art.
These days, grief doesn’t come in grayscale.
It comes in sepia, a reminder
of how the past can never breath the vibrance of today, how the scar will never blend into
the skin,
how it is better to look upwards, somewhere
in the dark sky, find light and expect smiles
to swoop down like shooting stars.
But smiles do not fall here.
Art from Europeana on Unsplash.
Poets do not sing.
Poets do not sing rhymes
because it’s blasphemy
to beautify agony,
fooling god with death and dearth
when the reverberation of the first
does not lessen that of the second.
Here we ink verses with blood,
and literature spills across every street,
congealed, charred, lasting a while before
sunrise forgets again. Someday,
posterity shall find our names, lost
in jagged lines and distorted verses,
metaphors caught in cr ssf re,
similes devoid of referents,
ironies drenched with dirges.
They shall trace the edges
of the page to unearth evidence that
not all poems are beautiful.
Some poems are spl in ters,
products of br o ken poets,
prickling the skin to remember.
Benue is burning.
Mokwa is drowning.
Borno is dirging.
And when poets lie in their beds at night,
an eye shut for slumber, and
one open for the robber of breaths,
they fight consciousness to know,
what use is a beautiful poem if it doesn’t sizzle
the pages with enough truths to make it burn?
Art by Fons Heijnsbroek on Unsplash.
Dead men do not tell.
Dead men do not tell
war tales, for there are no listening ears
in the grave. The ants here sing of
freedom as they pinch at my fresh flesh before
decay sets in. And
isn’t this what you call agony?
slipping from a carnivorous country to
a carnivorous grave. Sometimes,
our room forgets itself a cocoon & drapes itself
in a coffin silence, so when bullets
lull you to sleep at nighttime,
it holds tight and never let go. Say
we all are corpses dying for a dead country.
The news spell how to live but not how to live:
avoid these joints in Lagos, inform the
world before lodging in a hotel,
don’t cross alone from Abuja to Kaduna,
don’t sleep alone in your bed. because one day
your name will be knotted in a thread of RIP
hashtags, and for a fleeting moment, we shall
remember you as one who died for a dead country.
