Droop Song
shaped like a light bulb in a distant home,
like the earth on the eye of a telescope lit
by sunbeams greenshadows
and moonlights, the egg a cone of dreams
drops from gray linings
through scented sunrays on a hole or
nest in my heart,
and romping bubbly on the roof of love
dipped in red rose blood fragility hits
awakening,
broken, a robin is born; a mold of
music serenading those who die of
love for a corrupt beetle eating deep
into red marrow of the reeds that
measure the marsh with the idiom
of tides,
and the roots should hurry the streams
flowing south with the language of
sea gulls worked on the fibres of my
colours, bristling black
and let the mangrove trees by the lakes
stretch their long arms
to the island of my birth as I face walls
of eternal waves roaring, rolling mightily
towards a graphless pit of six shades
there, death fingers a butterfly revving
the machinery in its thorax for flight,
a troubadour comes on a poorly tuned
wing,
some fishermen too should hear the sad
stories a loner tells as he pines from
pond floors
seated on boulders of argument drunk
with the waves’ wine splashing on the
logic of logdrums inverted for the spirit
that do not know why I live on the foot
of a bird
why my voice seeks to merge with the sound
from the other fields green with microphones…
Andoni
my life, when it faces volumes
of variations
which broaden the streams
at a border,
as loved,
takes many forms,
forms of the chameleon under lampshades,
a lament, serenely digging
the yellowstone bedrock
for the song in paraffin flames,
for putsch and lambs
sacrificed for the growth of lilacs
that perfume nostalgia,
a lame duck at mudbank a coquette
tracing rivulets with its feet the path trod
by bluejays
piquant yet a portent of
shadows floating on
crosswinds
sated with the telex of
sinuous tsunami,
how do I ford these forked gulches?
a sister here, a brother there,
both knowing wavestorms
by name had said this while I
was dating a piranha filled
with sun energy ” undress,
feel adam’s pulse at noon,
and leave paradise for the God
who was
an unforgiving gardener,
how do I harken to voices
scattered on wind
colliding as they sweep destinies
across landscapes
tattooed with separate cities,
the nectarines hanging outwards
from pines
like udders invited by a disinclination; a fledgling
and
conductress rejecting the fare that must be paid,
the fare
that is a passport carried in a satchel
to study the purity of disbelief of roots when
emptying one’s soul into exile,
and home, standing strong on the other side
of long valley, weeps for you, Andoni…
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Tares Banigoe Oburumu is a graduate of philosophy and religion from the University of Benin. He is a lover of God.
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