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NOTE TO THE HILL



By Komolafe Samuel

9.359720N  31.600830E
Dear Hill, I see you’re crouched, busy between light and blackness.
The sun to your face, your shadow to the other, yet in all with smiles.

The wind is a whooshing finger and only you know its touch,
In the waver of twigs, in the sway of muse, in the energy of rustling leaves.

I was a collage of mirages, a chase in the wisp of shadows.
But when your word came, she sought me and ate me up.

You are music to me like the Nubians once danced.
In grandly acrobatics, amidst the carcass of fire and mist.
And for you, I have swallowed such devotion like praying priests gazing at crucifixes.
That in the healing of pain, I might be cured of emptiness.

Learn not to know me, only to say my name this way;
I am daughter to a tearful ocean.
If only you know how I got forged from sores cited in tender places.
How water is a secret place to embed fears/tears.
How it is a stealthy place to sob/sorrow out softly.

Strangers are strange when they embrace.
But of the numerous cobbles sapping from your vastness, I am one.
The strangers who cuddled warmth for us are called friends.
I am thankful to the son of water;
the god aesthetics whose heart sung into artistry as the test of itself.

And sometimes, I’m on the shore of that sea that sips champagne.
Beneath the moonlight and in the shadow of the palm fronds, I dance in my wind fluttering skirt.
And while the whisper waves cold, I waste to the lust of things that cannot be held unto.
The sea shatters, yet I pick up its pieces in the chronicles of myself.

Hill of lustre! Silence’s liveliness, you’ve lived in this air for ages
but will you make my century?
I solely wish you stare down at the beauty of your slope to see what you are – A hill.

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