A stretch-marked
body springs
from a broom-bunch,
forked, disparate.
Frayed as chewing-stick
thrice soaked
in mouth-vile then
spat, morphing
Into prying moulds,
shards of sin or hurried
prayers; a lighter grey
drawing the world to itself.
There is no end to this night
of mutterings, supplications—
knees built into the ground, bones
nailed to the doorpost of torment.
The house of prayer burns still,
incense fills the archangel’s
nostrils; his heart breaks, then
mends itself to break again.
II.
We invented tragedy here
a Greek gift sold in ounces
until Roman histories in the Aeneid
when folly held the reins—
Drowned the horse of power
where the Nile met the sea
and greed sat drooling,
pleasuring itself to the moon.
Like kernels stripped of nuts
cackling in a blacksmith’s forge
faith stretches its fire to the black body—
a fictive past, an imagined future
Adversity breaks it into soft-steel
the steel resists, the softness breaks
the ore melts, flowing into a mould
that will equally be broken.
So then, a tapestry of brokenness
is woven, the fabric life wears
through direful entrails of nights—
the edacity of predatory hope
We survive the night to die at dawn,
or sometimes the day to die at dusk
we limp, trip, fall, weep, but rise
so, when I say people are my clothes
Imagine them broken, worn, torn—
an amalgam of all that life brings,
beautifully spread like the wings
of a giant butterfly, in the midday sun.
III.
The heart is a sack of sin
its weight sinks the spirit
till its rising is botched
and the wrenched phoenix
Forgets the third day’s act
is that of triumphant
masquerades thronging
the cursed streets of memory
With sound-bending whips
and beatings that muffle time
the past is reborn
the future still-birthed
A cry is song without
memory, or poetry when
home and exile collide.
is it time we hold?
Or Èṣù who mounted the
poet, rammed a Portuguese
barrel into him so his soul
could foresee healing?
IV.
Kiss me, Judas
my forehead waits
my torso wrapped
waits in the city’s nights
Without fright or fight
the message came
expunged from the sea by
the soutane-wearing prophet
His hair, locked in a
battle against itself,
breath soaked in Miss Paris,
lips ashen from nights of
Salt-watered invocations
bouts or warfare,
slashing the sea-wind with
a scriptural sword—
I had the sea in my hands and
all the world’s wind in my
mouth. The prophesy threw me
aground, beating itself into me
Hyenas crashed into the pen
as the shepherd slept; the herd
dispersed and the shepherd waking—
grabbed life by the skirt as she fled.
Striations wide as the market’s mouth
usher in the painful promise
of beauty and a phallic fall—
Judas carved his art on my face…
V.
And Judas became one with
the night, warming himself
by the hearth of our songs as
twigs after twigs spread their
Feet in the fire called freedom
the cries of our hearts rising
as ashes with the winds to
the seventh heaven.
Suddenly, the stars were naked
twigs and leaves morphed into
garments till the whirlwind
spoke and shame made our
Home its resting place. We
fell for his eyes glistening like
a suckling’s; heaven’s blessings
are sometimes human, we thought.
We took him in—one bright
star for our sea of blackness
we were—man and wife
tending the devil’s begotten
We laughed as children
of the moon to come. Hope
was our ship till it became
a pathway for Olokun’s wrath:
When a brother sinks a dagger in
your soul, the heart your lover
inherits is a deep-breasted wound
thirsting for healing…
Servio Gbadamosi
Poet and publisher, Servio Gbadamosi, is a recipient of the 2016 Ebedi International Writers Residency fellowship where he co-wrote the chapbook, A Half-Formed Thing with fellow residents, Ehi’zogie Iyeoman and Ikechukwu Nwaogu. His poetry collection, A Tributary in Servitude, won the 2015 Association of Nigerian Authors’ Prize for Poetry, and was shortlisted runner-up for the 2018 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa.
Gbadamosi’s works have appeared online as well as in journals, newspapers and anthologies such as Nigerian NewsDirect, ANA Review 2017, ANA Review 2018, ANA Review 2019, Crossroads: Anthology of Poems in Honour of Christopher Okigbo, Fela’s Re-arrangement: A Collage of the Poetic Biography of Nigeria’s Folkhero of Afrobeat Music and The Sky is Our Earth: Anthology of Fifty Young Nigerian Poets. He coedited the poetry collections; The Promise this Time was Not a Flood: A Sevhage Anthology of Flood Poems and Salt of the Heart: Anthology of Poems for Nigeria at 50.
He currently heads Noirledge Publishing, an independent publishing house with a focus on mainstreaming a generation of new voices in contemporary Nigerian writing.
Social Media: Facebook.com/betaservio, Twitter.com/betaservio, Instagram.com/betaservio.
Photo by Emilio Garcia on Unsplash