Every day the city dwellers build tall
bridges to keep the sea from sinking
their housetops, their tongues unmasking
a Calvary of prayer songs:
Let everything we love find a way to live a little longer.
Let the sea grow its hair backwards.
Nobody survives the sea’s happy dances,
the speeding horses of time, even the old man
cradling his daughter’s small body like
a gold meat. Baba, how I wept all night
for the dead you cannot bury, stars turning
into ash, ash pouring over the clean mirror
of your happiness.
What does memory know about love if not a war without mercy?
Here’s the rain. Here’s a cathedral of birds
revel-dashing behind wind-eaten curtain of leaves.
This is the logic of mourning: a white horse
taking the longest route to the slaughterhouse.
But you are not the horse. You are the myth filling
its bones with the burnt salt of grief. Tonight
I gift you a kiss below your left ear, soft
and clean like a baby’s slow suckle. There’s
a sky growing empty enough to mask another sky.
Njoku Nonso is a Nigerian Igbo-born poet and editor. His work has been featured in Palette, Bodega Magazine, Memento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigeria, Rising Phoneix Press, The Shore, Brittle Paper, Kissing Dynamite, and elsewhere. He is a Pushcart nominee, two-time Best of Net nominee, and most recently a finalist for both Open Drawer Poetry Contest and inaugural Lumiere Review Writing Contest. He is currently working on his first poetry chapbook, and still loves stray dogs.