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.
Adesiyan Oluwapelumi
Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, TPC XI, is a medical student, poet, essayist & Assistant Editor of Fiery Scribe Review from Nigeria. Winner of the Cheshire White Ribbon Day Creative Contest (2022), his works are published in Fantasy Magazine, Shallow Tales Review, Poet Lore, Tab Journal, Poetry Wales, Variant Literature & elsewhere.