Agarau Adedayo writes

YOU ARE?

Where are you headed when you walk? 

Your mind is a novel of mysteries

And you are a word that does not have a meaning.

Where will you head when you wake? 

You are a figure of distilled silence;

A room painted with the colour of fear—we fear 

For the fire in your armpit causes a war in our homes—we fear

For tomorrow is a broken boat that carries you into livid tides—we fear 

That the dance in your foot is that that paddles you home from us—we fear

For you and the lost echoes of your name, we fear…

Where will head when you die? 

Into covers of engulfing cankerworms, the reapers that come

In search of cakes and broken spirits like gourds scattered around a torn earth? 

Into caves of waters, green waters, deep green waters, very deep green waters

Fluids flowing in bellies of madmen and their children’s children? 

Where? Will? You? Go?

We know.

You are the song we sing at the burial of children 

The lamp we burn before the night sings a chorus,

The rain that gathers before the cloud becomes African 

The wind that dances along in spaces between our palms,

You are a solitary revolutionist, 

You are a lost night guard

You are a discording rhythm 

You are a misled lover

You are the vanishing words we said 

You are the memories we want to forget

You are not something good 

You are our tears, the tears of mothers,

The shivering sighs of siblings lost in the loss of another, 

You are a bad omen,

A rain in the sun, a rainbow curved around the path of blood, 

You are…what?

Really, what are you?