We all have excuses for praying to the gods to fill our broken frames with ellipsis and dots
but we are silhouettes hoping to come alive from the light of the moon.
My mother once told me to be cautious of headless creatures offering me crowns,
for I shall run into homes eating faces barefooted and with naked tears.
I remember in Orlu when the dust lured us into finding blocks to fill the blank spaces
created by the gods, but we ended up in bistros,
whispering into the kaikai in the cups and naming each dot of our ellipsis.
We all have excuses for being born in a graveyard of living corpses
but we cry every morning, singing melodies of ancient folktales,
dreaming ourselves into thorny floors of stolen images.
A goldsmith said to his kinsmen:
Kill me with my sword, burn me and feed my cremains to the little ones. Perhaps, they will grow up without the broken jaws of emptiness and burnt gazes.
We are graphics drawn by a maestro during an eclipse,
pasted on every wall of a dusty street, and trying to create new kind of beauty from
the dust and sun. This is cartography.
This is how we are; we live our lives growing in the branches of things
and spend our lives trying to carve words to fill the ellipsis
Nwaoha Chibuzor Anthony is a Nigerian male poet who lives in Orlu, a sleepy city in the southeastern part of Nigeria. He’s 21 years of age and hopes to write his continent into poems someday.