Because I was rejected and detached
From my umbilical, I grew a navel.
I grew two feet and entered myself
In search of grace but found none there.
I was a bird for years:
Pecking opioid grains from the nurse’s pocket;
Whetting throat on dumbbells of dust,
So delusionally silenced by thirst.
I grew ears to listen to the song,
The one my body makes
While it winged through chronic dreams
That haunted me with a quiet pleasure.
It was a kind of addiction that grew too
And filled my body with an answering cry.
It fed me wine, a bitter extract from the thorn;
From the cross, it wended this way and that way;
From rib bone, it formed a humble prose.
I wanted to be that humble in my hymn,
To kneel in the roughspun hem of a choral,
Pull a long necked clay into kiln
To mount on a joy seeded mouth and ebb away,
Roughen the eddies and the tides,
And on my way, spend voice
As if a towncrier built a gong in my throat.
But I had been rejected before
And though grace is held there,
And I may have touched her dark side
Feeling the wound’s festering stench, I ran.
My navel grew roots; a wild tree,
It grew and embraced the old wither, time,
Fed its leaves with a brand new tune
And its fruits began as pale blossoms,
Fully bloomed at dusk.
I listened, my ears now wide as a sea.
I heard the world open its mouth on my soft shell
That had crept landward to better hear the news.
But there was no grace to be had here or there.
It was war, unjustifiable; yet war and nothing.
Nothing issued forth; not even an angelic clamour
On the rungs of bone my body had palmed clay on
To make its melodious wind blow.
So pass me a plastic cup to tune,
To find the keys to a secret stash of wings.
My opioid muse has stilled its waters
And now I will founder.
But before I perish, I take on the role of Orpheus.
I will, with tree, shell and dope sick,
Creep into tomb and sing messiah awake
From her sacred sleep…
Osahon Oka
Osahon Oka is a winner of the Visual Verse Autumn Writing Prize, 2022. His works has appeared on Kinpaurak, Sontag Magazine, Poetry Sango-Ota, Poetry ColumnND, PepperCoast Lit, Down River Road Review and elsewhere.
X: @onyemazua7735
Instagram: Warpedpoetic
Photo by Benedikt Jaletzke on Unsplash