(after Logan February)
By Boluwatife Afolabi
Do you know me?
I once tried to learn all your names by heart
but they did not stay I thought you said
if you knocked and I opened that you’d stay
Do you know me?
I’m sorry I thought you meant why my body
is always running into questions or forgetfulness
What questions?
Like what you meant when you said three is the same as one
is the birdsong also a form of worship?
what did you name the heaviness in my heart? why did you keep it there?
Adonai, there are songs inside my head that won’t grow or die and
on days when I pray for you to take them away, I don’t know
if you are the quiet or the storm
What do you believe?
I believe that I am such an ephemeral thing like
the wind or the transience of the harmattan breath
fading into glass
&
I am a dying whisper infiltrating the roots of memory
[I swear I’m tired of writing about memory now]
&
my mother thinks that I am the sea and the world
is a ship but when Kabosabroke my skin he found nothing
What do you believe?
I am saying that I have been suffering apathy[and inertia]
and when the doctor asked for my symptoms I didn’t
know whether to describe it as a prison or poison
What do you want?
Adonai,
I don’t want the questions running into my bones like water
I don’t want the drowning
or the gasping
or the heaviness
or the songs
or the prison
or the poison
I am saying that I want to be able to know if it is you
I’m hearing in the quiet or the storm.
BIO:
Boluwatife Afolabi is the author of ‘Cartographer of Memory’. He is also a poetry editor at Agbowo. In 2018, he was shortlisted for the Babishai-Niwe African Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Adda, Arts and Africa, African Writer etc.
Twitter, Instagram: @oluafolabi
