AKPA ARINZECHUKWU

21 Gun Salute

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I stop somewhere waiting for you.
                                             —Whitman

At the neighbour’s funeral,
time loses its weight. The darkness

of space is all that exist.
Earth, scalped & unfed keeps reaching.

& into the distance where a raven
can no longer whistle, a shadow. We

are standing between today & tomorrow,
against the time that no longer exist; the

shovels waiting to be used; earth always looking
forward to eating; farewells waiting to be said;

stones waiting to be hammered an inscription:
I was here. I was here. I was –

murdered by the wind, in a country where nothing else
was ever possible. Nothing except the wind that fed

earth, the darkness of this universe. Nothing, even desire.
But I desire the short cold hands of death, your husky voice

in the morning, as soon as the owls have awoken to begin
their joint procession into the unknown. Muna, we

have all seen what powers the wind possesses. One minute
the neighbour was complaining about our loud lovemaking,

next minute, police. In the street when we encounter the wind
& those dirt in flight hit us, your hands in mine become less

comforting. I desire you naked, strapped to the moon, moaning
as we touch each other in all the public places of the most high.

I want to believe a country always on fire will build a dam. We
can as well both believe the wind, when it hits hard comes

before a hurricane. Now I am thinking how much of our existence
lies in the things a bird can bear.

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Art by Ijeoma Anastasia Ntada