Portcullis
There’s so much chaos knitted
to the portcullis which my father
passed to be here. Before my
eyes, the branches of the nearby
coppice trees are pulling into the
families hairless like desert weeds.
the street dogs are rattling for what
walks out of the soil. The ostrich
on the other hand now disappear
after prayers. In a cinema a boy swears
he met a shadow of me in his dreamscape
& I sweep myself into the skin of a
caterpillar full of solitude. Today,
a restaurant girl hands me the
photograph of my mother — how
she looked at pregnancy. I swear,
I share lineage with the butterflies.
& before now, I was aware of beauty & light.
But, look, the fish is not graced to swim
with broken fins. I mean to say, each scar
I bear drags me closer to a mirror reek
with the lifelessness of dust. See, the body
is silence, even the wind is bulged
with terror. The house now shelters
the wetness of grasses & nobody is here
to narrate why the body has grown
aversion to home in recent times.
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 