By Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale:
we returned to a house full of emptiness,
nothing takes the place of what gives a house the feeling of home.
my heart became a mosaic of wreckage knowing it will live forever in a story
a mother is missing, where nights are un-demarcated from grief & bloated pain.
It was not difficult journeying into your photographs
to places your hands once tended with love in my body,
because memories reduce the weight of absence
& fill the body with footmarks of its losses.
dawn, for me, now begins with a teardrop,
with your face etched on the shelf like a fainting lamp.
to survive, we must never forget the faces that bred hope from nothing
to rays of moonlight gracing the night in our lowliness.
the teacher at school asked that I find God in every place of grief,
I think he was trying to say; live /do not break in the dark /survive
/fight with every brokenness lodging in your bone /mourn only where the birds are singing,
I walked into his voice & became one with fortitude.
I do not know how the dead live in everything they left behind,
some days, I fill my body with your face & break into a poem where death is bliss.
©Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale
Undiluted Poet
#undilutedpoetry