By Blessing Omeiza Ojo
in memory of Dr. Adewumi Oluwadiya & her son.
One of the women I stole for a mother lost her only son
to the house of many floors on his birthday.
Ah! igi ṣubú, igi kan ṣoṣo ní àgbàlá. The lone tree fell
& the birds scattered. The blade? — anything, anything sharp.
He didn’t see me coming to love his mother & her library.
Didn’t see a brother & not a planetary burglar.
Perhaps, he’d have waited for me. & who knows,
we’d have fished selves from the machete-banging smile,
sing selves to slumber, a yarn holding us to the heavens
as rainbows. We could have built a tower of glass,
flung no stone but prayers at our beautifully carved sorrow.
Here & now, I picture everything we could have become:
bugs in our mother’s small bag of kindness, in her bubu’s sleeve.
Worms in her library grating the language in the ancient copies
of Osundare’s books bought for a few naira,
& sing the songs of the marketplace.
Copycats, attempting the simple appearance of his autograph
& imagery. We could have picked the ordinary Nigerian life
& wear it dashiki. We’d have become listeners to folktales
told in serene voices. Editors of her chronicles of sowing voyages
in which nature calls her mother of green, of prairie. She’d
have roofed her poems in a body, call it what nature desires.
Now that she rests in memory, we could borrow from her archive
her smile out of reach, & paste it on our children’s faces
& say, this is what grandma left for you;
this, she gave us, the world & would have given you.
BIO:
Blessing Omeiza Ojo is a HCAF member based in Abuja, where he spends most of his time teaching creative writing, crafting poetry, and guiding children to literary and art festivals. His poems have appeared in Frontier Poetry, Split Lip, Cọ́n-scìò, The Poetry NND Column, The Deadlands, and elsewhere.
He tweets @Blessing_O_Ojo and is on Instagram @ink_spiller_1.