Anything Outside the Womb Knows No Freedom
Up as we ferry off the shores of Ikang river,
two boys, float their lives on the surface
of the water like dried leaves pulled out by hurricane. Their bodies — congested with dirt and ruins, and tiny strand of hope sizzled into a prayer on their breaths and headbow. Their hands smudged with poverty and a pocket-sized king James bible translated in a dialect we fathomed. They wore the regalia of my friends, the people i silenced in my jawbone like a bunch of oxygen. This morning too, the shore is scanty, almost all the people i know are either mourning, or busy burying their souls. Here, a butterfly is grief-stricken, something rayless like a pithole. Yesterday, a vulture unfurls its ember on the city’s cathedral and we morph — all of us — the young and old into the mouth of the radio vibrating from my neighbor’s room. the speaker beseeches; 47 people including men, women and children feared dead in southern Kaduna. forgive me, the closest i have come to freedom is in a wombscape. i mean here, inside life, life is a nightmare and breath is a broken hut. In bakassi a boy tells me he doesn’t like the shape of my life, how i wear out my lungs like a polygraph & i count my age backwards to days i could face the mirror unshaken by the brunt of sorrow, or the rifle. what glory parades the wings of grief? what might fit the fist of people unsure of tomorrow’s bargain?
Anderson Moses is an emerging poet from Nigeria, His works have been published or forthcoming in various literary magazines. On X he’s @AndersonMoses18.
The Marbled Sigh 