A Suite of Poems

 By Mathias Orhero

i

 I carry many scars with me, like a flag of victory

My body is a canvass and every mark is a painting

When you asked about the six scars on my chest

I told you that each one tells a story, six scars and six stories:

The first is a testament of triumphant birth

When at dawn and dusk, cries rented the air

When bed covers transformed into things surreal

That scar was an incision to trap the mind in reality.

The second sings a dirge of a world lost

When the mind realized that the hulk of a body was its home

And songs spurted from an innocent tongue

From dawn to dusk, the dirges went on, endless

That scar sealed the point between there and here.

The third is a prophet trapped in the past

When he sang songs of a future no one understood

He was deemed too early for the theatre

His performance disturbed the iron bells of our morning mass

He was trapped in a scar that sealed up in time.

The fourth tells the tale of a world of strife

Where eyes touch the ground to see what should not seen

And fingers point to directions that make the wind uneasy

Where thoughts sprout from hungry minds

And cast their shadows over a darkened town

That scar sealed a portal and preserved it in time.

The fifth is a memory I cannot now remember

But memories are never forgotten, only buried deep in the mind

Sometimes it comes up as a flash of a man holding a knife

Other times it is the smell of metal piercing the skin

The scar carries these memories, relieving the mind of the burden.

The sixth is truly special, the tale of an oasis in a desert

When the parched mind dreamt of words and water

And having both, was satiated in a sea of words

When Aridon entered the mind to say "the time is now"

And sealed it up after his entrance -

And around it are words profound, a pyramid floating in the air:

At its peak is a gold object with a red center,

And behind a voice that says this scar shall be your last.

                                                                                  

ii

Today my muse sings a song for me

Aridon possesses a nubian queen in the early hours of the morning

Her voice is angelic, clear, heavenly - a pearl made of sweet syllables

Her gaze is intense, distant and her brown eyes search my soul for something unseen

Her melody reminds me of things felt in ages past, things long forgotten

Her tongue has been pierced by the sharp needles of the sacred grove

Today she sings for me - melody sublime, words that draw me in

I want to worship you, kiss your neck, run my fingers through your hair

The space between us eats up most of the rhythm

I am greedy - I want it all, each stroke and turn of your wondrous voice

There are many things to do, mountains wide as the whole world

But your voice puts the demons to rest, traps them in the mind's abyss

And now, at dawn, Aridon slowly retreats and the melody fades

What remains is a queen whose eyes pull me in -

By dusk, she will sing again. By dusk, she will sing

                                            

Mathias Orhero is a PhD candidate at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He is a published scholar with interests in minority writing, Niger Delta literature, Black Canadian literature, and poetry. He sometimes writes poetry and spends most of the day staring at a laptop screen.