Vacant years

By Wisdom Adediji

Night nests upon the sky, and the moon,
too shy, cowers behind my neighbour’s roof.
The rubbles left in silence’s womb burst loose
as the wind wrestle against the lineage of spine leaves
holding my window pane from falling, from wedging
off its wearily nailed calvary after years of unfulfilled
promise to keep cold away. Over these years, vacant
like the ajar-toothed window tucked together by the spines’
optimism, I still find questions to the role of time in healing.
One could think the clock moved on but the wound behind
Its neck still calls to its past each time I hang it on the wall.
Like the clock leaking decades, I also watch my days melt
through the spaces between my fingers each time I perform dua.
In my dreams, I hear mother’s prayer-tainted voice being
obstructed from heaven by little children’s kites
floating amongst the evening starlings, and I am too short
to reach for the kites and clear paths for her prayers, too short
to grab the years leaping off my shoulders as I outgrow my dreams
too short to reach for the tired window pane and shut it from
the crickets’ final notes tearing the silence in my room apart.

BIO:
Wisdom Adediji, NGP xi, is a Nigerian genre-bending writer. His works have appeared on Icefloe press, Kalahari review, SprinNG, Afrihill press, Nanty greens and elsewhere. He won the 2023 Ufahamu Africa Student essay contest. He currently studies geography at the University of Ibadan and writes from there.