a daggerpoint
& what is salvation
if not how we give our body to beauty
to the memory of what does not rust
—Othuke Umukoro
the Sunday before this one, the catechist
warned about hellfire and its odor of smoky taste.
he said it would come unto us like the clouds,
breaking off whatever remains of our clear sky.
the next Sunday, i hear the flowers in my head wilt.
i smell the aftershave of smokes and i bury my
head into my brown palms, begging to be virused out
of all my sins. apparently, what the catechist didn’t
warn us about is that it isn’t only hell that breaks
the bond between a father and his son. the heavy
artillery fire of war can do the same.
in my mother tongue, a poem is a battlefield.
here: every stanza of this poem is an equivalent
of the demarcation line between who survived the last
war and who didn’t. here: every line in this poem
is an equivalent of the rows of my brothers and sisters’
bodies buried by their own homes. here: every word
in this poem is a noose around we survivors’ necks:
a prayer translated into a gun or a death toll.
this stanza is intentionally left blank for all the bodies
we lost to the soil and gun wounds.
something in my head is whispering. it says
in Darfur, every civilian is a moving bait slowed
by thorns in front of a cocked gun. it says in Merowe,
tears are the new ways to know you haven’t been
claimed yet by the fighter jets roaring in the sky above.
for now, ignore the dead butterflies falling off your
chest and supplicate to god. hell is not a thing
you want to witness twice.
In which a country becomes a song that dies on your skin
in this war of a country,
flames die and are reborn as hell,
songs die and are reborn as bullets.
this is a way to say
that everything cool, here,
becomes balls of fire raining
our heads into confusion.
once as a boy, i sat and watched
how a home can turn into the mouth
of a tiger that eats men alive;
how a home can become the mouth
of a grave that swallows its own sons,
& dead bodies, & dead roses.
growth didn’t come with seasonings.
i do know now why my father heaves
a large breath every night before
he shuts his eyes.
that must have been the weight
of his grief leaving his body
till the next day. today i brought out
a palette, and painted quranic verses
on every part of my body that hasn’t burned
to the heated flame of this hell i call a country.
i know what it means to be born
in the middle of a war. i know what it
means to become mouths slashed into songs
of peace & harmony. fa inna maha-l-usri yusrah.
this darkness that illumes the sky will soon
be chased by light. & the breath i hold
will be ridden of every scent of the war
i’ve fought. lord, let victory songs find
a space between my jaws tomorrow.
lord, right this story till there is no space left.
Saheed Sunday, NGP V, a Nigerian writer, is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Best of the Net nominee, a Star Prize awardee, and a Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation member. He has his work published in Lolwe, Strange Horizons, Trampset, The Deadlands, North Dakota Quarterly, Shrapnel Magazine, and others.
Photo credit: Bruno Alcantara via a Creative Commons license.
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