ARIYO AHMAD
A CONVULSION
In this stream of my imagination / I am a bereaved star wanting a home as the cloud / how do I succumb to this sudden fall like a bird that collides with the hunters bullet? / like a molecule of rain softening the lands hardness / give me your happiness and accept my tears / isn’t tears what the eyes shed when a luxurious pain poke the mind like death of my cat? / sadly, I possess a key of the unseen to my sadness / I will give you a glance / someone died one morning and it feels like my world went on an hiatus / I was away from saving him / my shoulders are growning of the burden which I keep trying to push away / it sucks to admit he died because I wasn’t there when he called my name, death must have blocked my ears and occupied me with childhood playtime/ his name changed after he died because my tongue couldn’t comfortably scuttle his name in my mouth like my mother’s morsels of Eba / but a dead man which death had gotten him of name befit him but causes me pain.
I tried, I tried escaping from the room that treasures his body but I keep returning to it like the moon on every blessed night, with a stain of blame in my mind until he was carried away to his grave / God is aware of the falling leafs and of the grain in the darkness of the earth and the ascension of the soul in the night and the day my father’s soul finally bades adieu / Father, I don’t mean to butcher you with my silence and absence that day but after you passed on to your ancestors, your silence & absence kill something in me that i can’t recover.
Ariyo Ahmad, Frontier XI, is a Nigerian poet from Ogun state, Nigeria. A Pushcart nominee, He has poems published on Kissing Dynamite, Shallow tales Review, Sledgehammer, Icefloe press, Native skin and several others. Find him on Twitter @ahmad_akanni.