POETRY

Babatunde Waliyullah Adesokan 

                         CREDITS: MANVI SINGH

 

  

  DEAR CHAOS-IN-PEACEFUL-THINGS

I have heard the silence of the river 

I have heard the momentary stillness 

of a tadpole. 

I have heard its gills stroking the silent 

water & the mandibles of a nearby ant 

grasping dry leaves. 

A cricket rubbing the edges of its forewings 

& its short chirps stab the night into 

pieces of chaos.

I bury my own chaos in peaceful things 

& in the broken breath of my beloved.

Grief would language through silence 

& injure us with attention 

while its seed of chaos growls & grows

through peaceful things.

I render my wishes to a sea of smooth 

pebbles, gather my dreams in fragments 

before this eerie silence becomes 

a serpent of fiery tongues that turn 

invocations to a graveyard of dreams 

 

  EMPTINESS   

Villagers flee as Ogun monarch, three others burnt to death  - punch newspaper on the killing of Oba Ayinde Odetola, and four of his aides in Agodo village Ewekoro local council of Ogun State, Nigeria.

when unfortunate legs 

drag weeds into a town 

when a broken town burns 

her own king 

when the patriarchs leave 

children bent-headed on the 

back of their mothers 

every mishap in a marketplace 

will come home to roast. 

every good stew 

of the town will spill. 

a loss to the host 

a loss to sojourners. 

those who are placenta-ed 

to the town may not wish 

the town ruins, but the eyes 

of the elders that watch on 

till disaster turns okro wooden 

till it turns rams horn-less 

shall medicine a terrible epidemic 

of 

                  emptiness  

 

  HEADLINE:

Ten Killed in Suspected Boko Haram Attack in Nigeria—

VOAnews Feb.24, 2021

pillows turn to bombs overnight.

kingly homes now grow rats.

clergy homes become hymn-quiet &

souls drop out of bodies like yawns.

bugs lick blood & the cry of mangled 

hands stain crumpling walls.

haunted eyes graffiti sunken windows,

doorways: a broken mouth in horror 

& terror.

a boy becomes a wounded spider

loitering around the wall of a lost 

home in the northeast city of Maiduguri.

he freezes at the sound of a gunshot,

turmoil brewing in his silent eyes.

silence orphans him into crucible 

of losses,

of how the blast tore flesh 

of his parents, 

whilst he lives as a raconteur 

of their sad stories.

                                     

Babatunde Waliyullah Adesokan (Toonday) writes from Oyo State, Nigeria. He works with Firstbank. He is a lover of poetry; a lover of everything that breathes poetry.