Osogbo

By Isaiah Adepoju

Every evening wind-intangible,
feral shadows burst open the walls
of the city like hand ploughing dead
grass.
The hard, inarticulate things memory-
familiar, loyal to a fault— prise the city’s
boughs and sunders, its Recyclable God,
beat against morning & the innocence of parks
& fountains.
In the day of wrath in the day of wrath in the day,
Vacuous things persist without the possibility
Of movement. June’s colour terminal, February’s
Inordinate frost, colonies of children like swarms
against Akindeko’s mapled sunset, November’s billeted
hand sturdy on dust-green Salvation Trees—
burst open Osogbo’s ordinary and random combination of
body parts.
In the liquid silence of night she draws close her curtains.
Bulbs put off, camisoles, baguettes, briefs, passed into darkness;
woman of the pebble-heart; woman of fourth monsoon;
woman made of dew and fog; blessed, the hands that reach
in certain
that reach in certain, inexact places.
Be in me eternal the seconds-hand consistent,
the wet feet that slouch tars at funeral pace to where
hands dread to touch,
the moss and its desire, the low of evening and
the gold-brown lacustrine filth, the speed of road
to ambush and the safety of simple, eternal darkness.

BIO:
Isaiah Adepoju is the author of “Happiness is a Sickle-kinikan in my Belly” (Abibiman, 2024). A fellow of two national writing residencies, and the 2023 UNDERTOW Poetry Fellowship, UK, his poems have won the 2022 Lagos-London Poetry Prize and been shortlisted for the 2022 Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize.