Mouth of Motherhood
My dying baby has eleven fingers— the last of the eleven is the tomb where I buried her the last time. Two times a day, I dance at the market square. I dance until the gods are mere onlookers fading into the softening of moonlight. The dark has never been possible upon us— I and my blind husband who was found bewitched the last time he wore a clothe himself. He was a honest man until the gods sought his eyes in exchange for a child— he became a liar who lied about a whirlpool gathering stones into his eyes the day he came home filled with multiple hands stretching his body into the veranda, the next day, I became a thing in the mouth of motherhood— a cursed child who would never stay beyond the groaning of glare. Dear child, it is the third time and every time, the wound cradle inside a cringing cry with ruffled voice seeking a passage through the needle-eye of incision— a woman had said to cut into you each time you refuse the body of our prayers. I beg you, dear baby. This resemblance of grief will never wreck a leach— these mockers waiting to hear your cold body stiffen the grass off its livelihood.
M
After Morenikeji
In your hands, I am a child crawling out of sleep, with a mouth full of bloom & blood. In your eyes lay the crescent-umpire, shrilly as the wind from the broach of cold stones, too many times, they’d fall off the radar, splurge into sharp sand, still, the rain will not gather a Nile in your throat. For your words were stern, strange & supple, loosening & reclaiming like a sentence clawed with semantic souls, they’d keep the fire’s redness, surround the heart like fingers in the beginning of fist, soar like eagles in the morning of thirst, sit like providence in the body of pretext. Alphabet after alphabet, strictures find freedom upon a taffeta. I’ll pretend to be as blind as sleep, hoping there’s an end to the question of desire. Four hours of warmth in the lounge of wounds, you fall like stars break into dusk & kiss the bough of litany. Kindness must be monitored, as God’s grace gropes the green & earthlings. Yet, your pour out your knees before ache strikes a gain from the drench of your soul. How good are your parched lips? Little worried about life as insidious as the profit of void. Holding the rose petal’s retrenched fame, clenching the flurries of fluke, elegance bees the hum of your heart. There in your room, God cried into his hands saying, let there be rest & you appeared, whiter than bliss.
Adeniyi Odukoya is a Nigerian Poet, Essayist and News Journalist. He’s the author of the poetry chapbook, Preserve This Light, published by PoetsInNigeria.