Agarau Adedayo writes

FOR BAGHDAD

the night falls
on the soil that wears our spirit;
owls shall perch on the wings of the wind
with songs that flutter past their beaks

this song shall have no lyrics
we shall tap on beat and shall still lose counts
this song shall have no rhythms, no rhymes
no words to qualify the smell of blood— the fire that burns

we shall hear lamentations of children in this song—
echoes that hold our homes in bizarre—
fathers shall walk down dark street
mothers shall leave their wrappers here

this song shall stand like a prophet
that sees the height of a dreadful night
this song is a rock that calls our soul to salvation

this song…

Hulegu's Siege of Baghdad (1258)

Agarau Adedayo writes

CLOUDS

You are a cloud 

you move.

You are a cloud 

You open the sun to the world;

You are the harbinger of my smiles

When you taught yourself the rudiments of living 

Like clouds,

You became clouds—dark clouds 

You drop down tears packed in cascading silences, 

Surging eyes trembling of memories and I remember 

You used to be clouds that I rode to heaven.

 

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?

 

Agarau Adedayo writes

Stale love

Someday,

I will dis-tune myself

From the songs I sing.

I will sing something different from

The tender caress lying in your touch

The different route words carved on your lips.

I'd write something,

Not about the nights we danced in the rain

Or the demon that runs when your beauty sparkles from afar

Not about the promise that shivers in your eyes

When I pluck the stars and nail them in your balls

Or the scent of love that burns incenses

From your bosom to my temple.

Agarau Adedayo writes

HOMEWARD

 

I shall come home

From this forest of bony branches

Where centipedes crawl into waterholes

To end their looming gloom.

 

I shall come home

From this room tainted in black

Where gecko swallows my prayer of freedom

And spiders web my daunting dreams.

 

I shall come home

To your waiting arms, Aduke

To wash the night off bloodshed

That rages down from wailing cloud-stead.

 

I shall come home, tonight

With fainting breath-failing strength

To die at your heart; a vacant slate of destiny

Till I wake in the warmth of your palms.

 

 

 

Agarau Adedayo writes

ORI:

i.

Before we came here, I,
With other wayfarers
Have chosen ours.
Before the river of fate
Have we washed our naked bodies.
Before the palmist of destinies
Have we covered our dreams with obsolete palms.
Before the psalmist of songs
Have we chosen dirges as choruses.
Under the pregnant clouds
Have we chosen the tethers of rain.
Before our homeland
Did we pledge detriments.

ii.

Before you my love
Will I revert my fate.
Before you
Will I undress off the coat of misery,
Off the choice of penury.
I will before you cut the tang of troubles
Tied to my tied cuds,
To tell a fresh tale of palm wine and stupor,
Not another of stale wines and scourges.
Before you will I become a man
Not a slave dying in the hands of fate.

I will stand, not abase, before the room
Where they tied our voices to choose against will.
I will wheel my tongues to protest
Against the fate they offered your helpless soul.
I may choose to die in your place
I may choose to be on you death bed
And place you to care for me, you may,
You may walk away, staggering beyond frails.
But, whether you will will to stay
Or wish to fly like a caged bird tasting freedom,
I will stand to exchange these fates
That looms in the snare of doom.

Agarau Adedayo writes

BROKEN

I.

After the cowries of divinity

Had been cast on the bare soil of my soul

My shame came like a naked man

Chasing purity with three stones.

II.

I have torn the veil of trust and

Sunk the fragrances of modesty;

I have winded the words of wisdom

With the air of hisses driving through my lips.

III.

You might decide to walk me away

From the land my fathers left me;

You might drag me to the marketplace

Where children spit on my destiny;

You might take me to the river

Where the goddess sucks the blood of divers;

You might desert me in the cold hands of this jungle

For ghouls to tell tales of surplus sustenance;

You might bury me with my faulty choices

Under the shed that covers my fame;

You might tie me to the roots

Where midgets of giant dreams rot.

IV.

But,

When the night comes,

Leave me and my blood stained purity

To tread this lonely path in filthy solitude.

Agarau Adedayo writes

Midnight Memoirs:

We'd hear sounds of aching missiles

Banging the door of our happiness

Against the lock of divine anguish.

We'd hear the moan of painful demise

Fainting tick by tick as the wind blows beyond

To bury voices in the equator of a silent world.

We'd hear war sing of boredom where

Grounds cry for bloodstains.

Behind our home, hue of grim

Would cover the naked eyes of the land.

We would not sleep.

We'd sniff the dirty smells of  death

And see flood of bodies on our streets.

Bodyless heads will be planted in gutters

For in due time, they'd be the relics: the map

That leads our children to their homes.

We'd pant our life through the nostrils of terror

Painting our fear with the colour of a faded faith

Leaving the shadows of distuned hopes to fall on it.

We would not sleep.

We'd remember this story every night

When the scars of sleeplessness

Stings the pains of a looted peace in our vessels.

We'd stand to sing dirges whose lines die

In the middle of passionate rhythms.

We'd sit to cry for the sons who sailed beneath,

For the daughters who strolled beyond our views,

For the mothers who wailed for all

For those searching for tears with torches.

We would not sleep.