Tares Oburumu's Poem

Title

Guitarist & The Audience, In A 2022 Van, Driving Through The City Cut

Into Two; On One Side Is The Body Of A Girl Burnt For The Beliefs She Once Wore

As Jewelries, On The Other Is A Time Bomb Seen As A Flower Growing Under

The Tuft Of A Flag Stained With Defeat: The Cry Of Mothers Called

The Elegies Of Beethoven. 

For Beauty

The word MERCY, I am like you,

soft as the freshwaters of Syma.

I am filled with rose

petals; brittle blessing – broken into pieces of

forbearance, then grace.

To confect, to put yourself together,

you grow into a single beet flower; the scent

is assertive, the colors – each carries honey,

each is seductive. Where can we breed the bees?

Over & over again, I sail toward my apotheosis

elfin or garden, poring the shoreline,

which the waters measure with the length my heart

can carry.

I paddle my mind away from the sea

I have known for days, too blue not to be true.

I needed a plot of sunlight & solitude to sit down &

to think, to reckon the hours till the country becomes

usable again. Yes, home is just a thought you

trump up as roof over your head; an ache

trying hard to glorify you. I sail toward my poise.

I have never been unhappy, watching you

in the split, glassy on the TV.

You spill, as color, all over the national news.

What can the small talks, possibly say?

Today, I stand in the grapevine holding on

to the emeries, where we can rebuild what has been

destroyed by hearsay.

They say you are the door I have been opening,

to enter the revolution the house keeps closing.

The things you would die for, do they believe in you?

Does God believe in Alain Borer enough for him

to believe in God?

Of sedition, there’s more to dying than the affirmatives.

In the corner of an inflammable street,

the rituals of surrender tiptoe over the tripwires.

A scope of arms spreads, briefly, within limits & loss.

I could see burnt courages, dreams shot in the heart.

A toy-car, too, in a plastic dump.

The weight of a hummingbird’s wing is heavier

in the nest than when it floats down the wind,

ascending in protest.

I am thinking, now, about my hands buttercups

rested on my lover’s thighs the night before;

long symphonies sang over the need to reinvent

the bedroom,

then the guitar: the strings come as clear as

daylights when you touch your own soul.

The music becomes Lilian Eze's mirror.

See how we preen ourselves in her notes,

vulnerable, yet outfoxing the pockmarks

added to the orchestra by way of a historical cult.

Her hairs float in us. The van has already

become an instrument. We strum the roadmap.

The traffic is sick. It is difficult to say it’s separated

from the governorate. The drive is long, & longer

is the will to reach the revolution; isn’t that word the horizon,

the image of the second coming of our lord, Jesus?

Love the little Nigerian that being a bum deals you.

& sing it as your own, says the emigrant.

What do you know about a nomad, a desert crossing robin?

Here is the city he left behind, & a sister raped by fire.

Here’s the epitaph & everything the aquarellist

says she is: beautiful, beautiful.

Even as a girl living now under a heap of blasphemed

stones.

The tweets die, too. Almost a practice. But mostly,

I wondered: how does a hand flaunting a vote

save the dead? Or a flag shot in the head?

Here she lies, six feet below the internet. Facebook allergies.

Time or apple on the wrist of a Miss can do nothing

but to be beautiful. She was infinite as the universe

on the pages of Forge Literary Magazine.

In the hands of the young Williams Blake, ticking away

in his photograph, hung above my bookshelf.

A wound always in the shape of all I have ever read.

I am the kind of inventions that would have

made him rich; ache drowned in the prints; words

intensifying the almighty love, endless in the way

the sky sings of its expanse.

In the warmth of my own silences, I walk into the center

of my mind & stare at all the wannabe poems.

I ask, do you want to be born in these hard times?

Tares Oburumu

Winner of  2022 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets.