(cover photograph direction: Tobi Amida)
Aubade in Udi Hills
For my grandma, Mary-Magdalene Chibuaku Ndiolo
What is the cost of weaving agony into grace,
of brailling pain into a hymn for the bruised heart?
A spring wells in my eyes. Sorrow’s jewels
sliding down my face like raindrops.
This is not that poem where my grandmother grips her chaplet,
like a string of pills. Each bead, a plea she chokes on.
This is an epitaph of a lost boy. Playing his sorrows on a piano,
praying to its fellowship of teeth for solace.
Come. Let us sing mercy Psalms to the cloud of malady into which she ebbs:
Chukwu biko gozie Ochie Dike Mama. Nna gozie nnem, Ochie Dike nnem.
She lays on a hospice bed like a casket of dying dahlias,
I tremble as a jury of drips interrogate her fading skin.
And the doctor enchants the night with a spell; pneu-mo-nia.
A storm of dread erupts within me, rippling through my chest like a wound,
waves rising like an unburial of the Pacific. Why is grief the harvest of youth?
All my life, I have hunted for an answer. Truth is like peace; once found,
it cannot be unfound. So I tailor this dolour onto my skin like sunrays,
sewing elegies into elegance. Till the skies mistake my grief for grandeur.
My body dies in its sleep. A ritual to cleanse tragedy’s footprints—
scars tattooed deep in a boy’s innards.
In my slumber, I hear her voice falling like wilting frangipanis:
Nnamdi, Nnamdi nwam, bilie n’ura, maka na mberede ka eji ama Dike.
Tonight, you become a man.
Is this how it feels when your heart becomes a fallen bridge?
Blessed are the children unmothered by malady,
for they learn the art of healing by bleeding poems.
Mama, I will remember you as the cedar tree that grew into the clouds. For who, but you, daughter of Udi Hills, could ever make death look so god-like?
Unleavened
Isiaq, 20, was killed by a stray bullet fired at protesters during the EndSARS protest. The bullet hit his abdomen and came out from the back, Kazeem, his elder brother, told CNN.— CNN, Lagos.
Struck by stray bullets, may they never return to this blood-stained ground,
where grace was undone and youth, stolen. This is the hymn of the fallen.
At Lekki toll gate, a girl knives Agege bread in genuflection to the broken bodies
of the massacre— a fractio panis at the altar of mass graves.
At first, it was not a dream, but a constellation of youths in their salad days.
Faces twisted by grief, torsos swaying like tulips under a shadowed moon.
Then I fell into a trance as the murmuration began. Not a flock of starlings,
but of bullets. A commingling of bodies tattooed with blood, falling in submission,
and my voice vanished in a shrill pocket of sound, swallowed by the smoke of the fallen.
This is not the tapestry I desire to be remembered in—
running through a museum of cadavers as bullets pray on flesh like pilgrims.
This land is a Guernica, a cathedral severed from grace. Here, blood is tax,
youth is haram and genocide, praxis. Here, Kazeem scours the heavens for his brother’s spirit.
He begs the angels to guide him to nirvana. O, that my youth may not be my death warrant.
Each day is a Psalm never to know the coldness of the bullet. Let the body never make a muse of a spring. Freedom, the anthem of the oppressed. I carve sorrow into wine, offering it from my eyes.
This country is a bomb lodged in my throat— A mother devouring her children alive.
And heaven salivates.
