Marvellous Mmesomachi Igwe
Hiroshima Eden
Let us go back to the brothers in the beginning—
to where we first learned the exact difference
between a strangle and an embrace.
Love’s measure; the tightness, or
looseness of arms wound around your neck.
All the history in that little space of flesh.
All the cities burning. People burning.
Soldiers pillaging while children starved
beyond a siege, beyond a blockade.
That little line setting apart the living from the dead.
Such brutality— who has not wondered its origin.
For what kind of an animal kills its own kind?
Who has not searched for what has reddened,
what has darkened the river in our veins.
Where the fierce fruit was taken.
But was it not there already, the violence?
Was it not present
even as the apple crushed in the mouth,
even as teeth stripped off its red skin?
Go back to the brothers in the beginning.
You would find it.
The animal. The animal so violent.
The war as the club cracked open its first skull—
unsuspecting and bare.
Perhaps that was already the end.
There, where life became vulnerable, unhelmed.
Where crimson first spilled bright against green fields.
For every good thing knowledge—
that fierce fruit— has bestowed,
there was another sword, sharper, filled with death.
Another Oppenheimer putting the cities to a torch.
Another war. Another war.
The club descending again and again.
Cain still strangling his brother in the rain.
The casualties climbing in magnitude.
The skulls.
And what of the garden we were given to maintain?
Look. Look at it.
Bio:
MARVELLOUS MMESOMACHI IGWE is a budding poet from Port Harcourt, Nigeria. He is the winner of the 2024 Kukogho Iruesiri Samson Poetry Prize, the co-winner of the 2024 Poetry ColumnNND Chapbook Award, co-winner of the 2024 Folorunsho Editor’s Prize for Poetry and a finalist for both the 2024 Kofi Awoonor Poetry Prize and the 2024 Dawn (Review) Prize for Poetry. He tweets @mesomaccius.
