NNAMDI NDIOLO

Unleavened 

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            As I have broken from my earthly tether,
            may I never bend back to my quondam, 
            that creature vacant of grace.— Let this 
            be the butterfly’s ultimate prayer to its creator.

Somewhere in Lagos, a boy is knifing Agege 
bread in genuflection to the breaking of bodies 

at the Lekki massacre— a fractio panis¹
metaphors away from resting in unholy sepulchures. 

At first, it was not a dream but a constellation of
people in their salad days, whose faces were contours 

warped with grief & torsos gyrating in darkness.
Then I fell into trance as the murmuration began.

Not a flock of starlings, my darling, but of bullets.
I see a commingling of limping bodies tattooed 

with blood & falling into proskynesis & my voice 
gets lost in a pocket of shrill. This is the tapestry I 

desire to be remembered in, running through this 
museum of cadavers, as bullets pray on flesh like pilgrims.

This land is a cathedral of candles disembodied from
their grace, blood is tax, youth is haram,²  genocide

is praxis. On this hot afternoon, a father is looking for his 
son’s body, he is begging the soldiers to release the relic of 

corpses they looted away. Each day is a Psalm to
never become a simile with death. Say— The Lord

shall preserve thee from all evil, for freedom is the ballad 
of the praying mantis. I carve my grief into a song & offer 

it as wine pouring from my eyes. Like a spring, it fills the ground. 
For this country is a bomb planted for my pain, a mother eating her children alive 

and heaven salivates. 

fractio panis¹ — the ceremonial act of breaking the consecrated sacramental bread during

haram² — an Islamic term for ‘‘forbidden’’

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