Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Ojo Taiye
Last Rite
everything i write, is a way of saying: look, there is a myth in my pocket & a whole sky
humming loudly like a deer melody. i am trying to tell you: i miss my mother. i wonder if
nostalgia was invented when our bodies leaned towards loss. the way i put a waning moon in a
poem & my mother becomes a wet bone daubed with memory & blood. this is about everything
after & what can be done with language. & what did i learn? i learned that perhaps history is a
pigeon—wherever he went, my grandfather carried her corpse across his back. i imagine the sky
above his head, dismal & thick with words no one writes anymore. home hems me in—my
mother talks in her sleep through his mouth. even now, i make up a song whose only words are
Sweet Mother, but when the time comes, my tongue forgets how to say them. tell me i am not
miserable—i remove my hands & give them to a boy whose throat is a burning tire. or perhaps
my mouth sounds foolish when it babbles with joy—does the wind remind your body how to
beg? now it’s almost over, like a lover, my life bends & kisses a hoarse hum of shells. beyond a
spider web resisting the rain, my grandfather’s chest is a burning homestead. & amidst this
chorus of desire—i whisper into my clasped hands enough to everything i love that will perhaps
be lost tomorrow.
It Is Time to Go Home
i’m afraid of the history i come from & i’m afraid of my failing tongue i misplace the rivers i
was bathed in as a child my dreams the sky my gratitude i forgot about the cities the favelas the
plains that reminded me of another home where i was a lone survivor i was born backward with
each syllable of my mother tongue mispronounced in ululation i’m twenty-six & i have no love
experience i didn’t love my country even though everyone tells me to be grateful for what stays
formless in other languages contains all the verb to make my body a border milk pooling my
missing names into a yellow morning where i claw for the two long burn scars stripped down my
mirrored face imagine i was given a wound i feel at the edge of my tongue there are no rhyme
between an ocean and a voice that translate as a single word for drowning in a song lyric for all
the water in my mirror throat i cannot sleep i cannot rest i am drowning as those who could
afford to leave all over the world oiled in the perfume of something burning home a sleeve for
silence a river to cross there will be nowhere to walk if the natural prayer of a swimmer is hope
or hunger i’m certain we all are looking for vision in a world we have made with a dangling
string a hand bends & bends again seaward a distant sky it’s not my fault i’ve found my ancestors
at the bar their ghost at least
***
Photograph of Ojo Taiye by Downtown Studios.