By Komolafe Samuel
There’s the stench of rotted tomatoes, bargaining buyers and a hot noon.
But from that place where we’re worn with a sore consolation and solatium.
I hear I’m responding well to the PTSD therapy. I guess I understand. But still, I see gunmen
Point riffles at my skull. Even in my sweaty dreams, I do lewd things to scary men.
But which is less miserable between, a cortege that never was,
a litany that never got sung for father as he died from sorrowing.
AND mother, a bereaved piece that wouldn’t muster meaning from the presence of her only child.
She is matter drifting slowly into insanity. Peering endlessly at the marl in the mud vase.
And the drought of it.
There looms a quietness, pilfered often by the yell of an infant. But this silence bewilders,
When it lingers in the air, when it coddles the upholstery, when it smears the hung photographs.
And nothing tousles as this cask of emptiness – The sole space left to fold into.
Day to day, I have an urge to death,
A bloating urge to step off the horizon of an existence that doesn’t matter.
To stroke my existence with such kindness, before yielding it in an extinguish.
Half-way through the market, a young salesman calls out to me: Miss, Miss
Upon walking closer, he says: Pretty Miss as his staring smile communes what seems to say:
I love your lovely.
I am looking to the earth and he does not know me or where I have been.
He doesn’t even know how I am a broken thing or how I am now mother to a fatherless child.
I would love to be the pretty miss he called out to,
but is beauty hewn from rust?
With tears in my eyes, I am walking of his shed.
And past mother’s deserted shop, lies normal gossiping girls,
A burnt tannery, ashen kiosks and breached walls
that are artifacts to memories wrought in flames and bullets.
They are testifiers to bloodshed amidst screaming market children and women.
In grieve, I am standing at the naked face of where I was taken.
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