Point of no Return
Badagry (circa 1840)
Muzzle-mouthed singing the silent song of loss through the ages,
branded boys and girls, dragged across the decks, these choking fish
who do not know their way home, another body wasted,
may we not be cold dogs, metaphors of loss and wanting.
If our names could change let us be masters and enemies:
come into our servitude, let us find our way home, let home
always find a place in us, let us not into the arms of chaos fall, not wards, not a slave name, Tòkunbọ̀; the filth of the sea,
let no such name fit us, wherever we go, lend us the songs
of Agbe, the bearer of many dyes, grant us spoils like Ibadan.
Dementia
An elderly man from my daydream
asked me to give it time:
history, he said, will always find
her space and audience,
her judges of honor and juries of fairness
Forget chiefs and sheikhs of chaos and avarice,
the men who turned in their broken brothers at Ouida shore,
snapped their wings and sold them into free doom.
Today at Ouida, men still seize
the plastic spewed forth by the sea
Like the shore in Boston, where wingless men
long to know of home
but dementia is granted
and life begins when return becomes a curse,
and ends when a new master wills,
ends
with lost manhood,
a train of oblivion filled with black boys.
Nowhere
Rachida found herself floating again,
hope lifting her from the chaos,
as the island drew near,
but shores test people who need them;
asylum seekers with no buoy,
and only Allah knows how they got this far,
churned in a night of ocean and no more boat.
A boy wants it to be over; a woman of burden surrenders,
Perhaps memory, perhaps her child,
curses the day of her own birth.
What is haram here, is it the man
trying to catch her from his breath?
Or the man on the night patrol
dishing out love for nothing
in a world where reward is almost a condition for giving.
