At the Gates

My mother’s spirit is everywhere, and I am a coward
who has run away from home in the name of healing.

I have left my father with the loneliness of the giant bed.
Whoever lies next to him now is not my mother.

Not her ailing back turned to him like a bow.

He seemed fine before I left. Did not see him cry once.
But I knew there was a storm inside my father.

When your mother was still with us, he began to say often,
his vocabulary riddled with the past, with pangs of absence.

Whenever the visitors came to see us, he would tell them
of the nights he spent with her by the hospital bed.

Sleepless like her angel.

He would remember trekking around town just to get her ogi,
the only thing she could manage to eat. The joy on his face,

a mirror of her own joy as she finally ate.

He spoke of the hours he stayed up. How she would awaken
in the deep of the night and see him in the ugly chair.

Ah ah. Ẹ ò tí sùn ni?

But how could he sleep? This is what love demands.
To be a guardian at the gates of death. To watch over the terror,

the fright that reduces the body to a slave.

I am afraid to love anyone if it means the sky will not move
when I call its name. My father’s prayers, not beautiful

enough to awaken his God. Useless like the years she spent
devoting her health to worship. The early Saturday mornings

she rose to clean the church, mindless of her knees
knitted with pain. There was nothing more my father could do.

When he was driving her to the hospital, they had an accident.
Only the vehicle was harmed, so that wasn’t what would take her.

What she would not survive was the lightening that lived
inside her body for years. And is that, too, a miracle?

If what is granted isn’t what is asked, has God still listened
to prayer?

There is no testimony if grace still ends in autopsy.
If mercy still leads to elegy, why should I sing salvation?

But I know my father still sings. I know he fills the emptiness
of his bedroom with worship that reminds him of what is lost.

And I am a fool who has run away from my mother’s spirit.

Weeping alone in my self-con in Ilorin. Still adorning
myself with her jewelry. Her rings, her handmade beads.

As if to remind myself she still holds me.




Lokoja

If blasphemy doesn’t get me burnt, Lokoja’s heat will.
The sun, my dear nightmare. Everyone is praying for
December. We know the harmattan is a relief here:
still an iteration of hell, but a bit kinder. This dry city
brimming with so many voids. In its dreariness,
the floods have decided to visit. I saw them during
my journey—entire houses at the mercy of the water.
Some children, fearless, neck-deep in the pools.
Smiling. Full of teeth. They washed memories of their
homelessness in the same damn waters that caused it.
The innocence to forgive what takes from you, to rejoice
in the world that drowned your joy. My city of loss.
I too have felt the land’s cruelty. The way I can mourn
two relatives in the latitude of months. My aunt’s funeral,
a call for her husband’s spirit. But if we continue to dwell
in our grief, will we ever ascend from it? The waters
will always visit. Their teeth will not stop taking from us.
It is the architecture of the world. We can only keep
so much until we are left with nothing again.
Despite the flood, those children swam with their hearts
bare in the water. If healing works, then it must begin
with movement.