OMODERO DAVID OGHENEKARO
cw – death, war
How to Measure the Width of My Grief
After Romeo Oriogun
The days grow redder with each new disaster,
the air thickening with the cruelty of men hungering for blood
and we are here, caught in the frenzy of a war, our songs hushed
into prayers whose tail-ends we watch, like kites, disappearing
into the vastness of God. We have all been shot towards extinction
by some mysterious archer, for some mysterious reason.
And now it reads, ever so clearly, that we were born to be rootless.
In the bombed-out expanse, the cry of a mother splits open the husk
of communal loss, & we taste on our tongues the sourness of its water.
What love was crushed under the feet of time? What mercy lived &
died in the fingers that twitched the triggers? Sometimes I wonder,
what if the spot on the neck where a bullet nests once held the imprints
of a lover’s kiss, & the blood, now let loose, once alive with the pulse of
desire. What has become of the body that was a dream— a home for
other bodies filled with dreams? The width of my grief defies measurement,
it grows with the number of bodies that fall daily, like leaves in autumn, to the
ground—the man instructed by soldiers to run, run until the bullets catch up
with him, until his running becomes a song in itself, his frantic trembling, a coda
that sees him off at the threshold of death. My grief is multiparous, often giving
birth to disfigured bodies riddling my dreams— the stale songs of the dead
stirring the waters within me. Yet the world is so full, but afraid, of love
that it withholds it like gold.
Omodero David Oghenekaro, Frontier XVI, is a young writer from Delta State, Nigeria. A recipient of the Inaugural Black Boy Review 2021 Book Grant and the Brittle Paper Spotlight feature, he’s been published on Brittle Paper, Lolwe, icefloe press, Afreecan read and elsewhere. He’s an undergraduate student of Biomedical Technology at the University of Port Harcourt. Reach him on twitter @davidomodero