(cover photograph direction: Victor Akhere)
Beneath the tongue of silence.
The heart’s attic collects dust of unsaid things,
And forgotten stars—light bleeding
Into the margins of darkness. Poetry blooms
In the marrow of absence, where silence is not
A void, but an archive of unspoken grief.
In the hollows of a dying tree,
The wind sharpens itself into a blade—its whistle,
A hymn to the nameless. Do you hear it?
The earth, breaking its back to conjugate
The weight of death: roots whispering elegies
To the ghosts of rivers that once held
The pulse of mountains.
What is poetry if not geometry of shadows,
Algebra of longing etched in veins? Metaphors
Claw through flesh, bruises waiting to be deciphered.
To unravel the language of the unspeakable—
Is to trace scars where stars collapse inward.
Does poetry belong to the living, or the dead?
Fingerprints rest on the necks of mourning doves,
& the eyes of children inheriting wars like heirlooms.
Their laughter breaks like glass, refracting the sun.
The poet’s hand, a thief, stealing vowels
Of the divine. Dragging the ineffable into ruin,
Into light. Each line, a wound too deep to heal,
Yet too holy to remain closed. Somewhere,
In the aching jaws of an abandoned chapel,
Pews learn to pray without their priests.
Dust settles for centuries, verses
Unclaimed by breath.
Decay speaks fluently. Do you hear it now?
Poetry carves silence into bones—tattoos
The abyss on those who’ve stared too long.
It is the bloodletting of stars. The scream
Of galaxies collapsing into themselves.
The first & last thing the universe will ever say.
If you must speak it—speak softly. Echoes linger
Longer than sound.
