POETRY

Salam Wosu

                    CREDITS: OSWALDO GUAYASAMIN 

  revelation

1. Unto the angel that creeps from the umbra of his father’s absence into the halo of his mother’s grief

2. I know thine name; premeditated prayer beads cast on your temple; parted holies torn apart shrouding tears yet to be shed

3. Thine lips, still crimson with innocence and eyes devoid of the leylines where grief – cartographer and sailor – sailed

4. Thine hands have touched – not a hem of a healer’s garment – but the edge of a carpenter’s masterpiece, timbered into a vase to hold a flower that fell to God’s spite

5. Thine tongue, shackled to the burden of the sun, enslaved to its surrender, like a flower – unpetalled but hopeful, waiting in the meadow for the son of David

6. I beseech thee little one, swathed in grace, to hold your name, your ‘answer’ in the enclaves of your mind, its potency a revelation

7. “And he showed me a pure [river}…clear as crystal… And let him that is athirst come to

You / Angel / Offspring / River / Revelation.

Amen.

magnolias on the ark’s door

“a rose survives the flood & suddenly God is innocent again…” 

                                  – Thorax, Logan February

Beyond this makeshift room of shimmering silky bejeweled curtains, I lie/

A lone rock in the meadow /Come, moss, come to my hearkening the same way grief embraces my mother’s sheets at dusk

I billow, a little scarf caught in the branches of the arbre perdu, swaying in the Sahara, endlessly trying to disentangle from pain I cannot see

The flood asks me “little flower, do you feel the throbbing chlorophyll / The way the sun doesn’t answer / the cleansing of Eden’s overflow?

This is the other side of God’s love/ The downtown of God’s benevolence.

This is where angels go to weep /won’t you?”

I answer – “There is so much water outside, I have none left to offer’’

I wait, my hand on the lintel, to supplicate to he that passes

“You have taken what is owed you / you shall not pass”.

                                       

Salam Wosu, a chemical engineer, poet and editor from Nigeria, is the founder of Salamander Ink Magazine. He had been featured in other journals like Glass: A Poetry Journal, Agbowo, Kissing Dynamite and so on.