BROOMS AS PUNISHMENTS FOR AFRICAN MOTHERS WHO GROW WRINKLES
Every woman can walk at any time, but never walk with wrinkles in your face under the lens of a burning sun.
you fathom what I’m saying, right? when your mom clocks eighty in the shawl of this universe, plant her in a vase like a gentle flower.
& if possible, bedraggle her till she is revived into an African Juliet.
since becoming old denotes a woman is perfect to company her daughter into a jug & morph her blood into a succulent nectar.
three moons ago, I witnessed a boy down the road of a university campus planted a rope behind the mouth of a tree & snuffed his last breath.
an autopsy reported that his mother was a constituent of black kaftan who paid him as a rightful ritual to those who fly with eerie wings.
was it not a wrinkled grandmother who ceased the breath of a stillbirth when Edun & his innocent mom journeyed home with a dead child?
be cautious. for every step you take walks to the grave grudging against you.
when I was younger, I knew brooms for miscellaneous qualities:
like brooms for sweeping morsels of food that topple on a sandy floor,
like brooms as punishments for intelligent geckoes that come to spy on the walls of our room.
& brooms serve as punishments for old mothers whose faces are colours of wickedness.
it is better you plant your wrinkled mother inside a flower pot before she becomes a prey of broomsticks, since no one wants to see her old.
GRACE
I learnt that no one laughs today that laughs forever. even the rich.
so i drew a country made of gold on my chest & watered my body with downpour of rose water. that’s, a glittering gold would enthrall my miraculous God’s eyes, & sweet fragrance would summon the attention of merciful angels into my heart.
I trained my body to be a choreographer in which every step I take leads to a cathedral of grace & I keep falling into the holes of happiness I had dug for perpetual hope;
they said hope is a communal vessel, so I rummaged for it on the skin of a lagoon, but the probability that I would grab one was very thin like the hands of a gentle rain.
this is what I wear on my skin as a black boy that cossets black hope.
I walk on flowers into God’s mansion, & place three fingers on my chest, & I realise hope lives here & it’s not going to run like a coward bird at the throw of small stone. this is how I say God is beautiful like God; God is handsome like God. that if you look at me, you’ll see God’s reflection mirroring in my skin.
if mother had known, maybe she would have named me grace.
Illustration: Subarnarekha Pal