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AKINLABI PETER
Adjoa
My name was inflected in your
Asante tongue. A cloudy message
frenzied against the waste
of a dying day.
You knew all of it:
the holding back and the unloosening;
fear and doubt sometimes; the deep purple veil
torn at the intersection of difference…
I cannot not sing of love’s lost step now,
nor of the geometry of dreams
left behind the eyelids of that sunset.
We played well with truths, waywardly;
we knew their insecure joy, their halo
of impurity gathered in the ague of denial…
You would play well with the defeat too,
a tethered grief at the edge of hope,
a folded space after the baobab’s last wriggle.
It was a gift as a betrayal-
and to recast it a life in a poem,
the shadows will be long cast, muddling
the river of certainty.
Now I will search for the telegraphic meaning
of that foreign vowel drawn in my
whispered name.
Takie
It all begins simply enough—or almost
a batik of wiles thrown over the fading light
as the evening falls, a clam, on the foreignness
of such bewildering beauty
even words sound tentative on your tongue, like
a struggle, not to break with the sultry air we
fight
to overcome; the vowels whorl — a prayer,
cross-legged,
suspended, fore played
it is in that adobe house near Takie: muse bare,
manes tangled: i reach to smooth back a stray of
hair
over your left ear, with a left hand of
abandonment —
then we, wet to wonder, banish guilt and
injuries
but that is not what we become, not what
we will reach for in the watercourse of
decisions:
now we sit on the porch drinking coffee, each
silently
recalling the astonishing shudder of a
collapsible roof
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| Akinlabi
Peter holds a B.A degree in English from
University of Ibadan and an M.A in
Literary Studies from University of
Ilorin. His poem "Moving"
won the First Prize in the Sentinel
Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition
(October 2009). He lives and works in
Ilorin. |
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