by Ajani Samuel Victor
Nomad
By the riverside, blue in its glory
I psalm a song—a boy sieving
through thistles for green. Here,
everything points towards home. The tulips
unfurling their petals. The peacock pansy
flapping its wings. The music in the lush
and thrush of the waters. Away from the river,
a ewe nurses a lamb. I see the tenderness
of love. The taste of mother’s warmth.
Again, I remember
home. I remember my mother. Her voice,
the tenderness of prayers. I lean on my staff
like a sorcerer concocting spells
I snap out of my reverie. Here, nothing is blue.
Home is a dirge. Mother is a malady.
I am a wanderer.
***
A Body As An Algebraic Expression
this poem begins by unburying
the root of the unknown.
say a body is a vowel
bridled by consonants of infirmities,
say my mouth is an equation in brackets,
a wineskin of questions
awaiting the integral lance of time.
say, for instance, my life beckons—
how do i syntax an aubade
with a touch of grief?
how do i concord a rind of grace
and a whirl of wail?
as it is, i’ve come to realise the earth
permutates between the gallows of pleasure
and chasm of pain, that time is only a cusp
between the living and the dead,
that we embody an algorithm
or say a constant remainder
of history. tell me, what is a body
if not an arc acute into void?
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