Tell Her

By Kunle Okesipe

 

Tell her that sheds a tributary of tears in the rain,
That mates her salt with silt,
In a jailbreak of feelings like funerary volcanoes:
There is a hyperlink of sorrow between her cheeks and a distant wood.

 

Tell her that flees the fiction of daylight,
Whose footfall is an echo of subsequent pains,
Her turn of heels a quarry to predators of vegetal fear,
Tell her even the dead tire too and winds lose their steam.

 

Tell her that stands appareled in nightfall,
Of flowers mute in the dark and aureate wings in the night sky;
Tell her that in the shadowy meridian of a dry watercourse,
There are ancient dreams of fishes also braving the claws of time.

 

Tell her the detours and crossroads on the highway of the soul
Have their final loop,
And the serpentine ravage of the ocean belt has a dry end.

Tell her that waits like a day star, there is always a night next door.

 

 

We can still be beautiful

We can still be beautiful,
After the flash harmattan in the climate of mind,
After the castoff of love, and flakes of peeling heart.

 

We can still, in the last trick of a tooth’s silver,
In the swan song of departing milk teeth,
Invoke a dying smile.

 

You say love is an excuse to hurt,
To spread the ache of longing in the carpet of heart;
Perhaps it is also an excuse to be human.

 

You say war too is an excuse to be beautiful,
That the warfare of kisses and the peace of fisticuffs
Are alibis to love the beast hibernating in our mind,

 

Like death is an excuse for afterlife,
And the bones of graveyard an alibi for the truancy of soul,
When the covenant with life is breached without its bones.

 

After this inventory of derailed footsteps,
After the inquest of necking and the trophies of black eyes,
We can still, without a backward glance, be beautiful.

 

Kunle Okesipe, a Nigerian poet and playwright, has published poetry worldwide in journals and magazines such as adda (Journal of Commonwealth Writers), Mediterranean Poetry, The Tiger Moth Review, The Revolution Relaunch, ActiveMuse and others. His plays include Professor’s Last Death and Aristotle’s Soft Spot. He has won prizes for his plays.