In the dream of my country, I am a child at the heart of a playground
watching blooming violets sway in the neigh of a rotting unicorn.
Bees busy themselves with nectar and I fan away the afterimage of a man
mouthing the bloodchorus of anthems. Is the horror greater in the gleam
of maggots revelling in gut ballrooms? Or, the stream of mucus honeying
the root of violets? A man confesses, my country is killing me, and it is forever.
The greatness of horror is in tense. Beauty and terror preening before hourmirrors.
A man confesses, I loved. I loved this land, and his broken heart leaps off the edge
breaking hearts inch towards. A country, then, is a matter of time. One sentence
at a time the dictator declared, and my syntax keels over. Years after the war, women run
across their compounds remembering sunlight as shrapnel. In the dream of my country
I am a child plucking violets, into a bouquet of trails, for my pilgrimage to the past.
Ọbáfẹ́mi Thanni is a poet whose works of poetry and fiction have received Pushcart Prize nominations. An alumnus of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study’s Writers’ Workshop, he spends his time between the cities of Ibadan and Lucille, making attempts at beauty.
