Wild Things

By Fasasi Ridwan

Unlike before, I have retired from walking the sorrow of my body.
Stuck in my room, peering through the mist-white morning.
The windowpane, awakened, opens its eyes to gray winged butterflies
proposing their love to the frenzies of flowers. If only every of
my grief-stricken poem had started like this, how grateful would I
have been? But they don’t. Instead, every opening line becomes
a knife. I mean what opens is a fresh wound
on my body. Every morning, the garden shimmers through the
hole in the little blue music. Nightingales leaving their
winged song on the loneliness of the breeze. & there are the green
veined leaves—monument of a bright child, dancing on the other side
of his sadness. It’s in every song, how I, too, have moved gleefully
across the dark room of my body searching for light. Poor thing,
who knew you could be full of all the things that grieve? All my life
they ask why my poems walk through the sharpened edge of blades.
All my life I have learnt to be silent, believing even the rustling of
leaves are a reminder of their affliction.

BIO:
Fasasi Ridwan, Swan I, is a Nigerian poet of Yoruba descent. Tweet @Ibn_Yushau44.