After Wale Ayinla’s Invitation
1.
In the past weeks, I’ve mastered the art of
gathering moonbeams in my throat; these
scatterings of light are lodged in the larynx.
& now, my voice carries a lullaby of the bodies
death refused to untouch at St Francis, Owo.
2.
In this poem, there’s a bullet leading you to the
altar to perform sacraments with your breath,
retracing your palm-lines with piercings from the
clutches of its talons to a path out of your body
where amen & everything holy dies at your feet.
3.
There’s how an elegy makes a liturgy
of itself in you, by consecrating grief in
your arms like the funeral of a new-born.
This poem holds nothing but sad faces
uncovering where to undo themselves.
4.
Today, I dreamt of building a castle with bones
and carcasses, painted it with splashes of red.
I hid myself in it, stretching my lips with
Psalm 91:3—surely he shall deliver me from the
snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.
5.
This is me at the calvary of redemption with a
blood-stained rosary, counting the souls rifles
stripped naked in church on a holy sunday,
while grasping one bead at a time, saying:
Lord, lead these departed to heaven. Amen.
