A Star That Has Already Gone Dark
What is the joy of a mother who only feels the contractions of the womb, never the contractions of her baby’s lungs against her ear; what use is motherhood, if there is no proof of small bodies circling a blackened pot like planets orbiting a star that has already gone dark; what’s the point of genetics, if all it brings is health so fragile? The first time I learned my genealogy, my veins read like a chronicle of fractures, a blueprint drafted by a careless architect. How the pulse rises and the blood flowing uncontrollably. I became aware of the things I dreaded. I chant lullaby to the mirror, but the mirror only reflects the pale geography of my own dissolving shores. Danger wears the face of my own pulse; the fluid that baptized my organs now floods them, turning sanctuary into swamp. What is the use of the blood flowing inside me, if it flows to the level that it unplugs the quiet, urgent dialogue between my ribs and my breath at the moment my service is most likely needed. I pause, would someone reach me a clay cup? Though I know water cannot recollect what my veins have already abandoned to the floor.
***
The Things I Missed Doing With You
After watching a picture of a mother and her daughter holding hands on Facebook, Aug 25th
***
The things I missed doing with you:
they stack like unread letters warped by rain.
I scrub the mould off each envelope, but the ink stays blurred.
Just seeing how you have outgrown them.
This is my regret: I let the hours leak.
You trace the floorboards of this house,
but the floorboards creak
in a language I forgot to teach you.
Sometimes to home, where you still miss home;
sometimes with your peers that ask you:
Is your father still not back home yet?
You nod because your replies are folded origami,
crisp edges hiding the crease where the question was snapped shut;
rough edges smoothened into an answer to absence.
I keep eyes on children of your age,
so close to read these messages:
how this weather in your chest has no umbrella;
my palm, open and dry, cannot conjure a single cloud.
I would say: your tender life here mattered.
But I stared at this portrait again to see
what your life inhabits behind this frosted glass door,
where your silence is not empty,
but wallpapered with things I can’t hear.
We are two mugs left upside-down on the drying rack,
drained, but still holding the ghost of the last drink.
***
Distant Decade
This life is shorter
once you carry
something that won’t subside,
say it is the body’s decline
or a deadline without a date.
Then the raw readings
press into your ribs:
no longer survival by feeding,
nor by the skin,
for the mere fact of waking,
that you once fought for,
but to hunt for steady labs,
to outlast the next crisis,
with or without
ordinary comforts.
Daily, you note
the colour of waste,
that filter’s failing rate,
each breath’s depth,
even the smallest cramp.
So you lose the record,
the one who walked without this watch,
who placed that fate in a time they’d postpone,
who swore it was another’s story.
Who would you have been?
***
My Father’s Son and The Bees
I am the boy my father prayed to be,
the son his own father never stayed to see,
the one who fled when death drew lines
between two communities.
He wanted me found in everything he did,
even when his own safety was a fragile guess,
and mine, a hope he couldn’t name.
When I think of him I see a man
who missed his own childhood,
who missed his children,
who wanted, perhaps, to be held
as he held us.
Once, I watched him.
We went to gather wood
in a farmstead, not knowing the dry grass
had become a school for a swarm.
At his first cut, they rose.
They came for him stinging.
He lay there, more shadow than man,
more child needing care
than the man who gave it.
And I still wonder:
how much emptiness did he carry,
how much silence,
until the day he was taken from us?
***
Poems (c) John Chinaka Onyeche
Photo: PEAR Unsplash remixed