My lover says I latch on to words. That I cling on to them like a child refusing to let go of a mother’s index finger. Like this child, maybe I am not ready for goodbye. I haven’t told my lover, but every letter escapes his lips screaming a loss. Of myself. A realization that I am not. That I cannot. be. bending and expecting to not break. When it seems, that I am clutching words, I am listening to the last sounds they make.
To the silent aftermath that holds things unspoken. The last sounds. Of silence. The loudest.
For every swallowing of words that have erupted onto the lips, I allow a little more dying inside, yet still hoping. My stomach bears a graveyard, harbouring all the unspoken. The richness of grief. The thickness of pain. Buried words find themselves. Buried words will unearth themselves. If they cannot be spoken because the lips have grown too weary to form their letters, buried words will rise to the surface of the skin and they will move the body, its whole, and they will explode. They won’t stay down. There will be no more swallowing.
Everything inside and outside of me will blame me. For holding it in. For letting it out. I am the last thing they remember me to be;
Morning’s wreck
Too early for me to have destroyed everything. Too late, for me to have done same.
Victoria Naa Takia Nunoo is a Ghanaian writer. Her poetry collection, Yellow Tulips, made the shortlist for the RL Poetry Award 2017. Brass Neck, her debut book of poems, was the 2018 winner of the RL Poetry Award, and a finalist for the 2021 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry.
