Blessing Omeiza Ojo
Fact-Based Journalism about Creation & Extinction
God, there’s a deity whenever your fingers caress the earth.
Vibrissae love the subtle scent of air & that’s what you give
poking breath into my nostrils. I do not know if my hue
says I was created in the absence of light, but I am dark.
The myth book says the sky slit & my brother flew here.
In another chapter, my forefathers came out of an Iroko tree.
Look how tall my sufferings stand, how long my endurance is.
A lullaby of lamentation, I was created after a heavenly revelry:
a dip of a liana into the mud & flung to the latitude line.
Or was I a flawless cry until the serpent’s first speech?
Whether through divine breath or earth, blood is here in a body.
Whenever I open my bone-made wardrobe, I am searching
for connotation in my origin. Sleeve rolling— there’s an ongoing
scrap to get better acquainted with the stiletto sluggishly slicing
my wellbeing. I know sorrow as a slothful shift in the syllable
of my breath towards silence. Sometimes, I hemorrhage
into memory — sharp & poignant— where’s my mother? I blink
my eyes & my mother’s portrait on the wall is my ancestor’s altar.
I see a doctor twice a week, my lifespan reduces by 2 ounces.
What kind of fervor makes my femur this feeble for fever’s fang?
Somewhere, a terrorist is in the kitchen cooking fire to burn down
a village. A man slaughters a brother & says, when we were yet sinners,
God commanded that he be the messiah, opening a slit to endings.
Picture our life an hourglass. A truckload of stars surrenders to gravity.
Here, men walk out to their hustling galaxies & return as cinders.
I remember Tony who smoked into the sky on the protest mourning.
He promised his mother masa on his return: his first ever lamed promise.
Voice shatters what doesn’t look like glass —isn’t this what death does?
Man, you’re a shadow song. However hummed, someday, you will end
on earth’s tongue from which you were shaped like my mouth after words.
Look at me— the eagle, soaring as if it’ll never perch. At the archway,
this means peace: my coming to know I will not be around forever.
Bio:
BLESSING OMEIZA OJO teaches Creative Writing at Jewel Model Secondary Schools. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, The Shallow Tales Review, The Deadlands, Cọ́n-scìò, Split Lip, The Poetry NND Column, and other literary journals. He serves as the coordinator of the Hill-Top Creative Arts Foundation in Abuja.
