Rafah by Oyin Oludipe

South Gaza

Flaw

Of pinwheel tails, of rent spires

Where ogres flash a sky-lane for

Earths to cast broken hairs

Deathless

On her limbless leap, thawed

At firestorm. Lumps. Monster liege

In morbid walls of botanist skin . . .

A world’s lone trophy at dusk?

This dusk

Her lips were split with missile rubs,

An anthem’s bait upon her thirst, yet

The pulsing skull of her would

Pardon?

Trailing a journalist’s morose report from that region, the bombardments at various parts of Gaza have only recalled to centre stage the sheer human gluttony for senility; the senile repetitions of violence in the place of reconciling ties, plain war crimes in the place of advancing ideology.

The recurrence sullies, as in the headlong dive of entire humanity into indignity. It is so because when a people – sentient beings as they are – are severed from the self-worth an immediate environment is supposed to proffer, that same denial also permeates to the very wider global human society it is intimately linked with. Albeit variant in outlook and motive, that Palestinian grief is, in no way, dissimilar to the spate of extremism we have whelming this country Nigeria on the precipice.

Somewhere in Rafah, after more than twenty four hours of Isreali aerial attacks, at an average of five an hour, the city’s morgues have had to place the bodies of the dead in cold storage constructed for fruits and vegetables. Because cemeteries and funeral processions are also being assuaged, people are afraid to bury their dead.

Photo Credit: I24News.

You Must Stretch Out Like The Sky

Journeying through Abeokuta one morning a fleet of motorists sped out of the jam and soaked the air in reckless dust. An hour later, I came across a suicide scene and a silent woman wavering on the bridge

          A dawn of dim feathers, the road spat

Loud, a new mist of robot chaos
 

Where limbs were groves of lust, rouse
 

Beneath throngs of screech and curse
 

A faint dark in the wind, not voice-froths

Whom the morning had made all one with the soft
 
Receding shadow, stale shafts of night


          The highway split is rounded by dwarfs, double-tiered

And strange procession on the flick of time
 
Offers a brown-rimed brew – of a lone sheath freed
 
From presences nocturnal, brown-eyed, brows brown
 
Shaped by the saddened hour. The light awaited harvest
 
Of the winding breeds when air was brown,
 
Brown as furrowed bricklayer beard shrivelled off

The brown wings of the sun


          Brown season it was — nostril
 
Draws breath in dew-wet ash, eternal to the soul
 
Eternal to me comes the brush of feet
 
In sweet sprint of gore-shone death,


          But it arose —

A strange image, when yet I saw 

Sudden form at the haze
 
Of death’s brown consul, slouched
 
Despair of moth-plagued fur at embrace
 
Of the lingering guardian trough, silent as the world


          And in that moment broke her tear of libation,
 
The brown suds of her heart. A racing cloud
 
Sunk her chin, for death she had known,
 
First reaper of the dust to time’s scorn,
 
Pale-eyed of the blurry dome… yet such
 
Startled pause at the hem she knew


          Now the trench teems with grief,
 
Joyful rite from the vicious deep
 
Brown was I, then, witness though
 
I spied the world through her eyes,
 
A human will indifferent to the hour’s passion
 
Shrunk in my ears, rose rueful
 
The imprecations of all humanity…

          Woman, you must stretch out
 
Like the sky. And shred your soul
 
Against the brown belly of the morning river



Sepia was first published on Kaanem Art Magazine