11/1/2018 Poetry by Bola OpalekeELECTION NIGHT The music of freedom makes my lips move slowly to its silent song – an incantation switched in my head as ordinary poem. Each time a doctor says tumor I hear "tuber", & immediately think of a knife & a naked fire, since that’s how the rich get fed in my country, cutting me in halves, probing. The idea here is to find what part of me is hurtful? What part is hurting? But do I even know myself well enough to know what door or window on my body never closes to pain? A shadow is as present as the object that owns it. But, of all the recycled truths about my body I believe the one that calls me a doll; because I cannot tell the taste of my own name or the smell of my old grief. So tonight, I am just a tuber of yam under the surgeon’s flashlight, wondering about many other things unclothed – a naked incantation interpreted as a poem. SEE MISSISSIPPI WITH FOLDED ARMS because he says slavery was a choice After we have renamed every river in the land after the farmer that made his dog his god we proceeded to burning the boats that brought a people we called slaves – sea trucks become bodies becomes ashes become dust. Wailing voices violently vanished, become air droplets. Disappearance makes its tiny appearance. But we know fire can only polish metals, polish shackles. When we heard the songs of the lonely paloverdes, because they too have known the brutal betrayal of the sea, we vomited sunsets through our ears. & here, we got confused – we got uploaded to the newer version of slavery that ensures our signatures appear across our faces. Are we not the ones tending to the ships? Are we not the ones charged with renaming things? Are we not the proud collectors of a people with no names? We, the renamed – the ashes, the dust, the wailing voices. SOME PEOPLE THINK DEATH IS ONLY FOR THE POOR but what hell would it be called when the church turn away sinners? each side of grief I bit was softer than my bones softer than the flower that grows inside the loneliness that would not let me leave, or die. death comes in different colors, strangely I chose the one that strikes only unbaptized eyes. isn't this how modernization romances immigration & no one remembers? no one also remembers how civilization built so many roads on the roaring sea without which the entire mankind would vanish into a thick smoke; her toned, greasy body evanescenced. we know the dead sing better than the living though we're too deaf to hear it. I pluck every sadness in my head, make sure its darkness is well lit in the name of a country that pulls travelers from the sea and burns off their boats, each of their pockets emptied of silver and gold. the side of grief I bit is softer than the cries of babies forcefully orphaned. no name rises for the horror of death that looms. they say no such death exists when, in fact, death comes in different shapes and soon, they too, would choose the one that broke loose from hell. one man unable to hold the hand of another would ask "what unkindness brought us here?" it rained inside my body and my country dissolves in its flood. Bola is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. His poems have appeared or forthcoming in a few Journals like Frontier Poetry, Rising Phoenix Review, Writers Resist, Rattle, Cleaver, One, The Nottingham Review, The Puritan, The Literary Review of Canada, Sierra Nevada Review, Dissident Voice, Poetry Quarterly, The Indianapolis Review, Canadian Literature, Empty Mirror, Poetry Pacific, Drunk Monkeys, Temz Review, St. Peters College(University of Saskatchewan) Anthology (Society 2013 Vol. 10), Pastiche Magazine, and others. He holds a degree in City Planning and lives in Winnipeg MB. www.bolaopaleke.com Comments are closed.
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