The world, untouched, is beautiful. So beautiful, guilt should sever our hands
when we taint it with any filth. Tell me, how would you dare redden here? This land
flowering with milk & hyacinths. The night is so blue, to murder a man should be evitable.
Yet the streets smell of death, smoke from ammunition poisoning the evening breeze.
& everything with a body runs. An errand girl runs, leaves the tap to run. The tap may
be a tap or a blood vessel. But who has time to check the metaphor? See, even the poem
runs. The bicycles, too, run from their owners. When they ask why, amidst the madness of
it all, the wheels respond, the police have done it again. A gunshot shatters the wind
&, again, something opens. Again, a cave replaces a surface of bone. By morning when
the children chatter, they would say amongst themselves, did you hear what happened last
night? They took some men & kept bullets under their jaw. Nothing will save us here,
not even our euphemisms. The gunwound will not seal because the child wears it a softer name.
We die, & we must accept our death. We grow, like destiny, into our coffins. The urge, always,
is to disappear, to live on the skull of some distant thing, where the bullets fastened to
the edges of the wind cannot reach. How can anyone blame the rebels for refusing to call this
home? Home is where a body feels safe to unfurl. If we step into the streets, they will put a hashtag
under our names. When we run from this country, we will not look back. We will run before we are
pronounced with erasure, before a rifle gives us its child to tend. Here, hope is a tongue difficult
to translate. When the optimists say the future is a rose, dead petals begin to replace their lips.
Samuel A. Adeyemi is a Poetry Editor at Afro Literary Magazine. A Best of the Net Nominee and Pushcart Nominee, he is the winner of the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize 2021. His chapbook, To Erase the Wound, was selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the New-Generation African Poets chapbook box set, 2022. His works have appeared—or are forthcoming—in Palette Poetry, Frontier Poetry, 580 Split, Strange Horizons, Agbowo, Brittle Paper, Jalada, and elsewhere.