Chronicle of Missing Things

My mother’s prayers fall back into her mouth

like apples plummeting down from a tree. A son

is lost, & father’s eyes quicksilver into sheen ash.

See no evil, & the eye albinos as a white seagull. Hear

no evil, & a voice traveling into the distance returns

an echo lost of its breath. My mother still beads

adhans into a rosary at the minaret, a mouth blooming

thorns. Three years into the future, all the children

in Ilé-Ife are lost kites floating away into heavenly

places, & somewhere between fog & a clear horizon,

there is a body raised to the sky cloaked in memory

& naked in touch. Here, the news headline revamp

the horror: A missing child is another dead child. All the

elders in my hometown assemble melting into

shadows as another child’s sandals lick the ground;

its trail erased by the rain. A flood, & a wailing mother.

A burning sanctuary, & its embers. A pyre of undead

children & a threnody. A crow perches on the house,

& the night pulps us into tragedies again. The light

has escaped our faces. Woe to the road leading

nowhere. Woe to the wind severing the placenta

cord between a mother’s love & a child’s tenderness.

An hour passes, & it is a year of distance that alienates

us. The weaning hands now hold stillness & cradle silence

in a quilted embrace. This chronicle writes our brothers

into history; tufts of tassels flailing in the wind to

become fleeces dissolving in a pocket of vinegar. An ore

liquefies our loss, & our tears become minerals mined

in the canary of our hearts. My mother, at the crest

of dusk, counts stars in the sky, & somewhere beneath

the beige of a nimbus, there is a son carved in the face

of light. Something alive burns like a violin set on fire,

music throbbing in the vein of chaos. I fold the silhouette

of my brothers’ panegyrics into my mothers’ lips & somehow

they are alive in our lips, in every song where they aren’t

clothed as elegies. Our sons are not lost. They are returning

& we await their arrival, sitting at the edge of our prayers.

Judge’s Comment

This is a poetic masterpiece, rich with effective imagery that conveys the emotions and message of loss and expectation.