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