Generative Healing

By Abdulrasaq Taslim

The way a body learns healing, the tactics:
bondage heaved into the soil of ruins,
encrypted with grief — the soul well-versed in rupture.

Grief, always oblivious to the grammar of pity.
The rupture: how the body is robbed
of essence while silence slowly molds
light from the debris of darkness.

Many things amaze me: softness sipping
into the body, blood humming the hymn
of wincing, the stubborn labor of clots.

I, a hostage in the coffin of my body,
crawl from this pedagogy—
this remaking from soft wreckage,
this emissary of hostile memories
gently fading like the open wound of war.

Even snakes slough for survival.
Flowers sail through the trials of the sun.

I have wandered the labyrinth of living.
What made me, if not stern maladies
sinking my frail boat in dark waters?
The waters, plaintive, sneering at my  weaknesses, 
and they say: Pity, the son of Adam is in peril.

O Lord, I am a weakling. Let there be
your cosiness, fresh as morning dew,
to fill the empty void in me.

I say amen to these little-little prayers,
for I have wandered the maze of resistance.
What holds me if not the thickness of endurance, the Lord’s endurance?

Beautiful: the creativity of pain in its ordering,
the unseen yield: quiet, lethal.
Let my soul, a pendulum, learn how healing
appeals to the mind.

BIO:
Abdulrasaq Taslim studies linguistics at obafemi Awolowo University. He loves everything about the nature. See him on X via @Afholarin.