Romeo Oriogun
Genesis
Within the first light of my birth
I was named after a war.
My mother placed a pinch of sugar on my tongue
To sweeten every darkness I will walk through,
Then she rubbed Hibiscus flower on my palms,
Which means son be tender even after the collapse of my walls.
I have left the road, it is true the forest welcomed me
Just the way distant places cover the scars of another city
& in the space between trees is a home but the world
Is built out of our survival & the remains of our grief.
I have wished death on my shadow from behind the cover of bushes
& saw it die & still the earth keeps building.
Did they know when they named me that what is named
Through blood can never be free?
Tonight, what sings is a bird drawing from the night sky
A little portion of joy, a means to make a wish
& I’ve walked into this song to reach my birth home.
On the red couch my mother bleeds and hide her blood
In the color of the upholstery, within her bosom
She evokes a prayer. It is true I was hidden in that prayer,
Named also after a wish for freedom.
A hymn begins from a Gramophone as my father
Picks her up and begins to dance, the air filled with sweet smell of incense
& mangoes. I stood by the side of a broken table
& watched them go on and on,
A truce fashioned out of a hope hidden in God & dance.
I saw the Hibiscus flowers in the purple vase & I began the ritual
Of rubbing a palm with its liquid to be released.
Take this war, take this blood I cried as my mother passes me by,
when I turned back to walk into the bird’s song,
An arrow pierced the night & found me on my knees.
Sacrifice
I was thinking of how light breaks through darkness
When he showed me a picture of my mother
In the arms of a strange man.
Every memory contains a void and I seek for the beginning of things.
I sat in the middle of what is not complete and heard her body hit the ground
As his hands stripped her back of the beauty of wings.
I folded back this sorrow into a house filled with forgotten furniture
Where a son touches the dust on a chair to remember
Who sat where during a dinner, who said the first light
Of dawn is not enough to make a city forget,
Who came in the dark and taught my father
An offspring is a lamb heavy with sin,
Who gave him the knife.
What I cannot replace is the silence in a man
But I can give him my eyes to see the wreckage he left behind.
See, a prison is a body begging for her scars to be touched tenderly.
Father, behind the bottle of gin the whip still lies.
Even in the dark what shows us the way is another body.
I do not judge her tongue drowning in sweet water.
I do not judge the man walking away from a memory
Splitting his son into an animal wriggling on the floor.
I only held the fire.
What I know, I know alone.
The city that births you can also kill you.
A Reversed Epithalamium or What Didn’t See the Light
We had planned for a quiet wedding,
Somewhere in the forest,
Beneath the tree where my mother was buried
Because what didn’t die happy must be given another chance.
One time we were in bed, a bottle of rum
On the bedside table, two half empty glasses beside it,
Our naked bodies a mass of happiness
And she turned to ask “isn’t this body glorious enough to stop you
From living in a rainbow?”
I looked at her, two eyes, two lamps carved out of the dark
And I wanted the darkness also.
I couldn’t explain to her why a boy’s mouth
Just like hers can be a fisherman paddling my boat to shore.
It is over now. Her, tired of holding her skin
Against every boy my shadow touches.
I, tired of holding my body in the light,
Begging to be seen, a shell lost beneath sand.
Yesterday I visited my mother’s grave,
The tree has been cut down and I saw a Doe staring at me from afar.
In my room a Tuxedo sits in the closet like a man
Staring at an empty street from a window.
“I've been thinking of how a body looks at the past from exile and process everything it has been through. there is, I think, a kind of grace distance gives to trauma, the ability to look back and say this is how it began. I have been doing that in these poems, they are my mirrors, they are my grace.”
