Like Torn Kites In An Hurricane
I cannot speak because my mouth is a grave – ‘Departure’ -Romeo Oriogun
Out of the depth my cry, give ear and hearken– ‘The Passage’, Christopher Okigbo
Am here and there, like torn kites in an hurricane,
lift these broken cupids- the memories
of an ephemeral love- off my eyes
and teach me how to be here again.
wake the bones the quills of your departure scythed to shingles
and grinded thoroughly to dusts by those memories of rose-budding and ritzy plastic asps
touch my heart, lift the phoenix that keep memories and caligraph
in the nucleus of my heart the ways to let go and find love again.
Lift these fingers of song that buried the soporific egret I had been
before the shredding of the sky
Hold my mind away from wandering to the lawns and boulders
on which we had supine and rolled fancying the hovering
clouds, heart frisking heart.
Malandra ! Take me back; pick me away from the lonely
road in this tainted rose-quartz dotting my heart .
Malandra! am gone old with white turfs on my scalp still
counting the days of love , death, kisses , romance
and beads that carried your waist to
the full moon-
teach me the rhymes of living ,
the song of resuscitation, the dance of reawakening- teach
me how to see you in the eyes of another maiden fair as Malandra ,
slim, quaint Easter Angel. Teach me to love again- that
love isn’t what takes us away but keeps us,
that love isn’t a parazonium that parts the tongue and hide in its belly
burial grounds defaced by the anguish of burning relatives-
lift away pains of memory- zap the outlines of
death pouring and drenching me
with fluids and grimes of catacombs –
lift the graveyard am becoming and stick in abyss
the twirling mourners roaming my street,
once golden, now jagged, tainted by footprints of
howling ghosts and reeks with the corpse of
the angel cartooning lullabies on heaven’s gate.