(cover photograph direction: David Obi)
Homecoming
Ọlọ́run má jé ka sí ní ilé l’ọ́jọ́ t’ébi n pa ilé
– Yoruba prayer
I find that the old house, once hunched over the loud road
has now chosen the steepest hill
to settle unto, gnarled roots buried deep
I can feel its steady pulse rocking through
the land, as I walk up the slope
Let me in, I have come home to rest
The house heaves & creaks in answer, a roused beast
welcomes my travel-weary body with a hardened mouth &
cold eyes carved by the stinging harmattan winds
that welt across its peeling face
Won’t you soften for me?
I enter through its forbidding doors, this stranger
that seems so much like the one held
in my memories & yet, feels as distant
I stumble through the hallways hush with ghosts
The house pants eagerly, sore palate dripping spittle
Where is all of the colour & laughter?
I sink into its earth & soon enough the house leaks
its shadows out in the open—
The rotting walls worn thin with anger reveal
vicious teeth straining for flesh
The sultry air ripened with resentment rations my breath
parches the moistness of my throat, claws &
scratches from the inside &
The viscous darkness creeps in, presses me flat & folded
into the coarseness of my cage
squeezing & squeezing all the while
The clomp of footsteps, disembodied faces, their
endless wails taunt me
Slowly, almost tenderly the house, with its roughened claws
draws out, returns me
to my carefully bound madness
And I learn quite well how nothing scar(e)s a thing
more than what it calls home
that carves monsters out of its nightmares
Through it all, the dust waits, to fade
my body to its nameless form—
I’m one of the sleepless.
The girl before she was named
Like all the women before me who swallowed theirs,
I am becoming/ my mother
How painfully I remember the girl in the dream
before she was named/ my mother
with a female body before it became
a mother’s
so wild & dangerous & bright
loud laughter, long limbs
light as wings
collecting all the broken things & people
from the edge of the singing water
hung on her arms, she swayed with them all
And now the music leaks
from her eyes, the eyes of a former dreamer
softened by the years
beautiful sadness clinging to her all the while
Oh, how I want to return her life to her
the one I rippled to arrive
into the sun of your world
Forgive me, all the things I have deadened
before they could become—
the eggs, the roots, mother
when you arrived to claim me
purple, riotous, aching bud that I was
beneath the tree watering life,
did you hesitate?
Everything trapped in song
Why do we sing ourselves to sleep
every night?
What’s so nightmarish about our dreams/
where we go when we still,
that must have us
sirened into its dark
Yank me from the mouth of whatever’s humming
before I sink
What’s hollowed out, taut, inside of us
the living, that turns
everything into music?
My memories, the woeful years all encased
in songs I cannot play
Why won’t these notes stop haunting me?
I’m jealous of all who have been healed instead
I panic when a song stretches
too long, gasp for quiet
Where does the sound go when I halt the music
The static silence, its shadow
gapes in the middle of the deepening room,
caved into/ my body won’t stop turning
All the distorted voices screeching
into my ears, where’d they come from?
Tell them to let go, grant me reprieve
I’ll listen no longer
Oh but why does it keep on
echoing in my head—
These strange lyrics, egging me on
into the wild
Can anyone else hear the incessant beats or
have I just gone mad?
make it/ stop
singing stop singing stop
