₦airaland Forum

danbrowndmf:
bros howfa na

Dan Bee! Baba! How far? Give me your number abeg.

gracile:
I love this

Thank you, gracile!

How Poems Rise Into Tomorrow

When Adamawa dies with fifty of its children
You will find a news blog that has the pictures.
Young bodies shrouded in white, drenched with blood maps
will teach your mouth to whisper white roses, then red, then brown,
then plucked before they blossomed and you will wait for the wind
that takes flowers before their bloom to blow through your window
and take you too to the sheltering arms of the dry sandy soil beneath
Adamawa.

Sometimes it is photographs from Borno that teach you how to mourn.
You will hear shovels in the photographs digging to find home,
and widows and mothers and sisters sobbing into their scarves,
then silence ascends into your body as if the photographs held
the face of fire, as if silence can also be smoke from burning towns,
silence rises into you like the the footsteps of darkness, slow, sure,
creeping into town at midday.

When the newscaster says the names of cities, you block your ears
He says Aba, he says death, he says Aleppo, he says more death
and his voice is the edge of a cutlass, smooth, sharp, hacking cities into
slices of pain too thin to hold between your fingers without getting cut
The news teaches you that all cities are the same: there are
more humans running from home, than running for home
Sometimes when there's a flood somewhere, you imagine Earth as
a toddler who bursts into tears after trying too hard to be strong.

Tonight you're writing graves into poems, cities into poems
You're writing three hundred girls that never came back home
You're watching your poems shatter the darkness in the room
You're smiling at the way your poems rise into tomorrow like
dust and smoke and hope and the scent of roses:
Brown, then red, then white,