I tender my palms to the wind, waiting the drop of a bird,
& I lay my ears down for music. meanwhile, a boy sits by
his mother’s grave, clutching a Bible & a pen. flipping through
the pages, he turns to the verse where Christ asked Lazarus
to come forth. here, he takes the pen & carves out the name
of Lazarus. he writes his mother’s name on a slip of paper,
takes the paper to his mouth, paints it with his spittle & glues it
to the place where Lazarus’ name once was, so that the verse
reads: [insert his mother’s name] come forth—& the boy waits, for
a miracle. but the earth is heartless, it won’t spit out its dead,
& faith, like God, fails us sometimes. for a moment, I wonder
who invented grief. then I think grief is not the problem, really,
the problem is that the maker forgot to make a cure. or maybe
grief is not an arrow meant to carve a hole in the chest, maybe
it is a kind of cleansing—the boy is still on his knees, waiting
by the Bible, placed next to his mother’s grave, waiting a miracle.
but nothing is happening. the world won’t amend its laws because
of one little boy’s heart’s desire, & I don’t think it will because
of two’s or a hundred’s. however, the sky must know what grief can
grow on the chest, & it must share a heart with the boy,
it loosens just as the body of water the boy’s body has carried this long
breaks, just as saltwater spills everywhere like rain, the sky’s loosening.
the boy is sticking his small hands in his mother’s grave, scooping
sand, scooping, scooping. I wonder why, perhaps to harvest his mother’s bones.
the rain keeps filling every hole he has emptied. & here, my hands,
they are still waiting a bird for the hunger, & my ears still crave the bloom
of a piano ballad. but the birds, fearing the rain, have fled the sky, & no one
but the grief-possessed boy is in sight. what if god’s answers to our prayers
come in undreamed packages, what if miracles aren’t always how we spend nights
painting them— my palms, still tendered, now filled with rainwater, I bury
my face in them & drink, & the strings of rain hitting the pavement, is this not
music enough? dance with me, I say to the boy mourning what he cannot save.
Ernest Ogunyemi (b. October 2000) is a writer from Nigeria. Some of his works have appeared/ forthcoming in The Indianapolis Review, Yemassee, Glass, Memento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry, Erotic Africa: The Sex Anthology, among other places. He is an assistant editor at Counterclock, and a poetry reader at Palette. He is also curating The Fire That Is Dreamed Of: The Young African Poets Anthology. His micro-chap my mother died & I became _______ is forthcoming from Ghost City Press.