3 Poems│Akin-Ademola Emmanuel

Six Months of a Millennia

//it’s just six months since cancer gripped my father’s lungs to the hospital bed & i keep dreaming of a bird who once drifted to the vales of perdition– now clipped of it’s feathers & buried in it’s piles of abandonment// there are so much of his addictive tobacco pipes & the unbridled fists he loosened on his wives & mistresses & how they found their ways out of his house//he doctors seek answers to the question of why has his body refuses to free him of the swelter/ding & torture//

Threnody

With the deluge of a broken tongue,
I learnt an elegy that
Swam with the vespers;
when you drew a watery line between my
lips & nostrils & the shores
Of my tender eyes as
you shelved your presence into
Dire oblivion.

Give me more nuts to chew with your palms
That greased my tongue
&
Smoothened my apple meat tooth
Father, where are you now?

You left me a lone bird
Entangled in the web of fate.

What Words Are There?

mr Bayo who sat on a swiveling chair months ago counting his fingers with a cigar puffed into the luminary lit room, now cries on the street. he strips himself naked & sang sorrowfully on a bourbon with overgrown dingy beards.

what words are there to tell of a private school teacher who lived below $20 a month– only learning how to crawl economically– & now crippled after the callous waves of pandemic blew him like a fowl who got damped in the rain & no where to hide.

a little boy plays flutes after hunger feasts on his belly– he asks what other gift does he have except flute & hunger ? the government offer palliatives like cockroach meals after that– telling us to chew the wind if we are hungry

What other names do grief bear ?

Akin-Ademola Emmanuel is a Nigeria-born writer and student activist. His works have appeared in PAROUSIA magazine & communicators league. He can be seen writing his memes on Instagram via @apostle_of_words_