AFTER THE POEM
I am the swallow, after the poem has swallowed
Morsels of time to sprout seasons; I am the season
Of a million swallows, like a night in heaven
After the poem has dawned
Faint resolutions stalk the heart;
As shrivelled earth on cockerel wings;
I do fathom, when the letters flap;
Flowers dance beyond a mind’s storm:
After the poem, I pick flowers and storms.
IN YOUR LAUGHTER
for Ami
In your laughter, heavens linger
And I wonder if the rainbows quiver
On your voice’s tenderness—as I—
As hair—as all the world that spins on your tongue
When shards of your presence touch me here,
Shredded in thunders. In your laughter,
Paths resonate, a season desires veneration
In dreams, and all epiphanies of a brittle sky
Unfetter the prisoned heart—and glow…
But not from any other but itself
Upon the hour of immolation…
Or was it the hour of revelation
At those sunlight notes who in their long
Jolly jump make radiant rainbow arcs
Beyond the grief of lone horizons?
Ami, your laughter is freedom—a garland ray—
Honey filament for the panting lobe
To the famished skies by the west—
But will you not first bestow to me
As true the rude cloud must eavesdrop
The stillness of even your song?
In your laughter, the noon succumbs,
And fantasies flutter like a nest of transcendent birds
Coursing to air-roots, to sudden plunges
Of the heart in sugar seams and melodic veins;
Eternities dance in your laughter, Ami—as air—
They dance—as that defiance of sand—
As the desire of wind—in instant passion—
As the courage of fire…
I know your laughter, Ami
I know your laughter—
O I know your laughter, like the hurricanes
Of my midnight skull, when bush-spirits
Caterwaul around my head.
I know your laughter
Like the tickle beneath my scalp, like
The wandering manuscript beneath my desk, or that
Primordial rein of the telephone ballad
In quiet recesses of my fear…
In your laughter, my solitude is a silence
In your laughter, my silence is a story
A DANCEIN AYÉTÒRÒ
Where deity fingers
Knead three naked breasts
On a market tryst
Embers of the night dance
Prophets of the ocean dance
Somnambulist streams dance
Where Ayétòrò meets
The world behind a scattered tribe
And manic shore, ancient froth…
Shadows of the lame dance
Rattles of the blind dance
Meandering gods dance
Where harvest stories
Stage a heavy tread of sand
For a gourd of mountain dew
Wraiths of the sky dance
Visions of the road dance
Sojourning hills dance
Where Ayétòrò grounds
Her hips against the shoulders
Of a universe inebriated
Moons dance
Moons dance
Moons dance
Oyin Oludipe was a judge for the 2015 Green Author Prize, a literary award for young unpublished poets in Nigeria. His poems have appeared in national and international journals like The Bombay Review, Dissident Voice, The Kalahari Review, Sankofa Magazine, The Provo Canyon Review, and Sentinel Literary Quarterly: The Magazine of World Literature. Oyin is the Nonfiction Editor of EXPOUND: A Magazine of Arts and Aesthetics.
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