In response to Billy Collins’ ‘The First Night’
By Chisom Okafor
I am holding unto the past like a monochrome photograph
to my chest, listening to your heart
beat against mine in this untouched dark
You say something about the past
not holding water anymore,
a forecast of hands, yours,
held against the darkness.
Let them go, you say.
The secret to understanding Einstein’s thoughts on relativity
is not far away from us, you say.
There is an orchard of hearts where ours orbit each other,
against the giant star of death,
and are helmed in by a curvature in space-time,
never falling completely into it,
but never drifting away, too
in an ever-evolving ring of grief.
You read me Jiménez in the fading light,
straining with each stroke of dusk, to catch the printed words
above an insurgency of cataracts, already overtaking
the city of your eyes.
The hardest thing about death,
must be the first night,
you read.
And Billy Collins:
you have me wondering
if there will also be a sun and a moon
and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set.
In a parallel universe, when we have tired the sun
with our talking,
and having sent her down the sky,
I see you walk to the gramophone
to play my favorite record —
a gift of dirges from a father to his departing son.
You invite me to a dance,
but my limbs, cachetic tonight, collapse just before
our rhythmic ritual begins.
BIO:
Chisom Okafor, Nigerian poet, editor and clinical nutritionist, has received nominations for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize and twice for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, the Gerald Kraak Prize, the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Account, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, A Long House, Salt Hill Journal, Isele Magazine, FIYAH, North Dakota Review and elsewhere He has also received support from the Commonwealth Foundation and presently works as chapbook editor for Libretto Magazine. He tweets @chisomokafor16.