BY OLAITAN HUMBLE
Hope Against Hope
& then we watch as our new year prayers morph into
cries & wails of lost loved ones—the ones who
used to hold our tongues together with fine threads of their
sanity but what can a prayer do than to cause
coincidences to or not to happen? a bird's flight
draws my mother to the sky but it is dangerous out there
now she turns to her gadget to fuel her fear with pictures
painted by __________ here in a multiverse where
help is nigh where nature is not buried under whispers of
different languages where paradise is a few blocks away
from home where loving is a civil responsibility where the
night sky still casts a shadow
The Map of my Country as a Portrait of Woe on a Landscape
Here is where we build castles in the air // we start
by calling our forefathers bastards for keeping
us away from a world of distorted songs. We were
told that there is a paradise below our soil // an
unnoticed picture on the map of our country by the
other side of the wall they built before eloping
with their shadows into deep waters // somewhere
along the contour lines on our map there is an
unheard voice calling for the wrath of the gods.
There is a letter waiting at a post office written
by a sender that never was // those who were born
dead & buried into the night sky smiling.
& all the nights letters like this are read // woe
in form of killer bees pinch our wrist & then
we say the same words our fathers did on the day
they lost the fight to the motherland & died // & now
we wake up to listen to the irregular rhythm of the cries we
chant as anthem // we listen as they blow with the cold
winds illustrated on our map within a landscape.
Olaitan Humble is a Nigerian poet and pacifist who likes to collect quotations and astrophotos. He won the People's Choice Award at EW Poetry Prize Awards 2020, March edition of Loudthotz Poetry Open Reading 2020 and JustDeen Poetry Contest. Poetry Editor at Invincible Quill Magazine, his works are featured and/or are forthcoming in Dreich, Crêpe & Penn, Wine Cellar Press, The B'K, Words & Whispers, Giallo, AGNG Mag, CỌ́N-SCÌÒ, Periwinkle, Doubleback Review, The African Writers Review, Ngiga Review, Cultural Weekly, EroGospel, Konya ShamsRumi, POEMIFY, the QuillS, The Wanderlust Literary Journal, First Gong Anthology and Boys Are Not Stones Anthology II, among others. He is a Features Editor at Urban Central and tweets @olaitanhumble.