How To Write My Country’s Name
You were a boy yet to unravel how the sky
holds the brittleness of birds in its palms with
out break
age//
without the trembling known to hands nesting tenderness
when men who carried the face of God beneath their turbans
sent your mother to heaven, not in the way God promised
—his son in the sky
& trumpets presaging an awakening of the dead—but in clouds of smoke,
& the stinging smell of burning flesh that filled your mouth with salt.
Other times, you want to think of it as another tale, but it is not.
Your toddling brother, your cousins, your father, you want to
think of them as variables in a story not this one
; one of a vase with faded flowers/
/one of a dining table with six chairs & a frilled tablecloth/
/one in which a boy is not struggling to remember who used to sit where/
/one in which peace is a boat going out to sea with a song that tastes
suspiciously like farewell,
one in which it comes back to meet the children waving on the pier;
one in which they are not stardust trickling into water
with a father’s voice calling Chineke, Chineke, Chineke in the distance,
holding the name of God firmly between his teeth
the way a mongrel mangles a rag doll.
Place a lamb on the altar & faithlessness is forgiven.
Last week, like you do every year,
you left the city with its many sounds
because to mourn what is dead, what is alive must be forgotten,
& took a day’s journey home, to your house
//your house of the dining table & its frilled tablecloth
//your house where grief is a wriggling animal tethered to a point
You traced your hand along the bullet holes in the wall
& wiped the dust off the broken picture of your mother hanging on the pelmet.
You have been doing this all your life, tracing your fingers along the edges
of unwholesome things in a solidarity of brokenness
—women//walls//birds
fall
ing
out of the sky against your
louvers in a confetti of feathers—
feeling in their own cracks your own fault lines.
You weep on the frame because a story that ended with ashes
//must have an epilogue of water
//does not forgive penance until the boats are safely home
//does not heed prayer until a threnody is sung for the ones sliced into stars
//until a body full of birds professes time and again to not being a cage.
Onyekachi Iloh is a writer, poet and visual artist exploring photography as a means of documentation, and the re-examination of sight. A winner of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barren Magazine, Welter, Singapore Unbound, Blue Marble Review, Palette Poetry and elsewhere.