In Your Laughter | by Oyin Oludipe

for Ami

In your laughter, heavens linger

And I wonder if the rainbows quiver

On your voice’s tenderness—as I—

As hair—as all the world that spins on your tongue

When shards of your presence touch me here,

Shredded in thunders. In your laughter,

Paths resonate, a season desires veneration

In dreams, and all epiphanies of a brittle sky

Unfetter the prisoned heart—and glow…

But not from any other but itself

Upon the hour of immolation…

Or was it the hour of revelation

At those sunlight notes who in their long

Jolly jump make radiant rainbow arcs

Beyond the grief of lone horizons?

Ami, your laughter is freedom—a garland ray—

Honey filament for the panting lobe

To the famished skies by the west—

But will you not first bestow to me

As true the rude cloud must eavesdrop

The stillness of even your song?

In your laughter, the noon succumbs,

And fantasies flutter like a nest of transcendent birds

Coursing to air-roots, to sudden plunges

Of the heart in sugar seams and melodic veins;

Eternities dance in your laughter, Ami—as air—

They dance—as that defiance of sand—

As the desire of wind—in instant passion—

As the courage of fire…

I know your laughter, Ami

I know your laughter—

O I know your laughter, like the hurricanes

Of my midnight skull, when bush-spirits

Caterwaul around my head

I know your laughter

Like the tickle beneath my scalp, like

The wandering manuscript beneath my desk, or that

Primordial rein of the telephone ballad

In quiet recesses of my fear…

In your laughter, my solitude is a silence

In your laughter, my silence is a story

First published in 'Love in A Moribund World: An Anthology of Love Poems'

Image credit: Cinnamon Cooney