Abstract; Forgive My Dearth of Quietude; Good Atheist – Three Poems By Nigerian Writer, Adesiyan Oluwapelumi

Abstract

I wear my country the way loss wears
a widow’s tongue, by which I mean
even absence is a clothing. & I, child
of riddled identities, lost in the labyrinth
of belonging, favorite attire is race. Once,
I pointed to a lineage & the remaining
fingers return to deny me. Say, here, I am
an ekphrastic portrait of stranger genes.
& even home isn’t home again. I mean,
like a phoenix plants its own death, I plant
my body in the pyre of my hometown &
I reap an harvest of shadowy bones. I mean,
we also earn emptiness. For at the immigration
center, the officer asks for my nationality & my
lips falter like a snapped bowstring & only the
crackle of a shattered identity expels the orifice of
my larynx. Say, I have sickled the apple of alien-ism
for a bite & now, I bear the broth of shame in
belonging to a body lesion-ed with isms like
a creek lacerated with hyacinth wounds. I mean,
home is not home again but a crime.

Forgive My Dearth of Quietude

I sickle a beak,
cause silence to forage tone
And submit to quiet.

Good Atheist

O Lord, if you search, deep down
to the crevice of your heart, you
will find me, a cold boy, shawled
by carton, shivering & seeking warmth
in the hot rivers of your arteries.
They say the earth is the Lord’s &
the fullness thereof, but what
are we: human phagocytes or bacteria?
Do I belong to your body or
am I but an impurity waiting to be purged out?
You say I am your image but all I see
is a mirror trapping a boy. Dear Lord, I want
to sojourn to the sky, wanderlusting
in the contrail of shooting stars
but you disapprove, paddocking me within
the boundaries of the earth.
When I erect a Babel, you crush it down.
When I garner wings, you make the rain fall.
Why call us equals if you won’t let
me sit at the threshold of your throne ?
Here Lord again, I am in the crippled squat
of an orison at your feet,
beseeching for equity in a non- egalitarian
universe.