Photo Credit: Freepik.com Someday, You’ll Learn to Love Yourself Like God Does You’ll learn to hug the person you see when you look into the mirror. Yeah, that same boy shuffled into bokeh in group photos, the one sent miles away not to photobomb personal pictures, the one cameras flee from. Perhaps you will learn […]
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Photo Credit: Freepik.com Midnight Is The Carnival Of A Dead Man Until G-boy pleaded with Kpakogi to help him with an urgent task, Kpakogi had been a menial labourer in Bacita. He loaded sacks of grain for traders with his wheelbarrow on market days and earned a living. He also worked as a bricklayer, packing
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Photo Credit: Freepik.com A Loving Father Just as it is written; Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated — Romans 9:13 (NIV) I would not blame Cain. If my toes slid into his boots, I’d steal Abel’s breath too. What do you call a man who loves one child & hates the other—God?
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Photo Credit: Pikwizard A Photograph of You There is a photograph of you holding your love, a newly washed white fabric up close to yourself in the heat of a Sunday that had just stretched its legs towards your nose. The sun, tasting yellow as the morning Pa said his last prayer, holding our hands but letting go of breath. You loved to paint, said it was the beauty the world needed. I imagine that when you left, you must have painted the journey blue while giving the wind a taste of your voice. Every morning, I spread our memories before the face of heaven, letting them wear its reflection. The grass begins to burn into glass, and I remember how much you admired crystals, with their ability to bend light. You said you wished to be like this, bending pulchritude into transparency, knowing how easy it is to break. but what is
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Photo Credit: The Atlantic after the aneurysm, every lost thing bears a new name verily, i’ve lost all till i’m only left with a hyperbola-shaped silence twice the size of an exit wound, and i know not how to label this misery, so pardon the weight of this poem for i’m still learning how best to carry it, only that it carries me too, to places i do not know. sings my soul into psalms that defile humanity, my identity. and god? he watches with a grey visage shaded in disappointment while i still cannot tell if it was i who turned my back against heaven or the heavens did so to me. believe, i’ve lost everything. i’m now losing myself. a therapist asks why i’ve allowed silence eat me this deep. i beckoned her closer into my heart’s wound like a probe, showed her the name of aiyah written inside of me, told her how she used to be my aorta before the aneurysm raptured within. ever since aiyah left this space, i’ve become a miscellanea of unwritten elegies. i stare at the stars every night, not to listen to their little secrets, though. their scintillate only remind me of her, how they hold the same beauty as her smile. yet, i count their numbers in multitudes, measuring them according to the pains she blessed this boy with. now i know what love does to one’s body, and mine no longer wants to bear so burden. dear tranquility, kiss me softly, fondle yourself into this body till i sigh every ache away. here, the therapist takes my hand, asks that i bide farewell to lost things, and give them new names, letting them find home elsewhere. thus, i begin by renaming myself. Contributor’s Bio Daniel Aôndona is a lover of arts and culture. A versatile, award-winning writer who hails from
after the aneurysm, every lost thing bears a new name – Daniel Aôndona Read More »
Photo Credit: Pexels Tribute for E. The day you chose to shut yourself off like a TV screen fading to black until all that’s left is deafening, cutting off the world’s voice as you watched from a muted distance, they wondered why their concerns, pressed into you, didn’t reach you— didn’t open you like a locked door. They questioned what they missed, like students unfolding their answer sheets to find every mark a mistake. They watched you lie still in that coffin, motionless, like the box that held you, and their thoughts wandered through every pain you must have tucked away, like the hem of the shirt you’re wearing now inside that casket. I am one of them, and I wonder if I still have the right to call myself your friend. I wonder why I was so blind—how I never noticed that even with all the light you gave, like a lantern in the night, you were burning out inside. We only see what we allow ourselves to, I think, because I can’t say you were hiding. That light must have been your call for help, but help only comes when the color turns dark. I recently read a line in a poem that compared the pale stain of a moth’s wing to blood on a murder weapon. Your light, now etched on me, leaves a guilt I cannot erase. Friend, I promise I won’t waste my tears— none of them will bring you back to life. I won’t ask how you are, because I know what your answer would be. I just hope that wherever you are now, you are held in warmth and light,
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Photo Credit: Flickr Rainy Ascension It begins like a grumble— a boy in the clouds learning to spit. The sky sprawls over the wheat fields, grey, & swollen, heavy as a belly in its ripe month. The goats, fat with waiting— stand knee-deep in the drowned soil, wool darkened, slick with birth water. A
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Photo Credit: Fineartamerica.com Memories on the Wall The rickety keke bus came to a halt, and the passengers alighted one after the other. I looked out the window, scanning the whole vicinity as I waited for the bus to clear out. Onitsha, the city of my childhood, the ever-bustling city with its everlasting putrid scent.
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Photo Credit: Vecteezy.com Waiting for a Miracle Again, the worms in our empty stomachs rise before us. Their groans, louder than the cathedral bell. On days like this, the tradition, as it should be, is to savor the aroma of chickens obeying the spatula in boiling oil. but in my home, chickens are on
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Photo Credit: Freepik.com I Know Where God’s Sepulchre Lies Was it not King Solomon, the scripture’s acclaimed wisest man to have ever sojourned on earth, who wrote in his famous treatise, Ecclesiastes, that there’s nothing new under the sun? And by that, did he not mean that there’s no vile thing the human mind can
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