Litanies

Olalekan Hussein, Nigeria

A day will come that I'm going to walk on the path of memories in a way my mother's dialect can reflect on the surface of my tongue.
like a bishop, I'll wear life on my body in a way that will please my God.
where I come from, tears is not enough to extricate you from the captive of a white cop who sees your night skin as a barricade.
the future is a gun full of plenty bullets that no one knows who will become a new headline to feed people's bellies tomorrow.
where I come from, laughter is not a signage of bliss, & tears doesn't measure the level of sadness that draws a map on a boy's body.
many times I have burnt my tongue with many unanswered prayers & I wonder if my lips are another roads that lead to misfortunes.
maybe I will learn to send prayers with my lips parting each other like ferryboats parting on the body of an ocean.
I have learnt the coolness of a morning doesn't mean serenity, & when albatrosses chirp rainbow songs into our ears, it doesn't signify bliss.
like a paper bird, I'll fold every piece of my body into my mother's palm before sun bumps into twilight. & with my feet, I'll plant a road through the body of a derelict sea as a skilled sailor.

The rendition of life for a faithless boy.

Olalekan Hussein, Nigeria

They say this faithless body is an enemy antagonising God because it forbids everything holy:

it doesn't know every road that leads to a religious house, the Faj'r call to prayer is a bullet & it doesn't benefit a flexible skin that hides under the retina of a local roof.

my memory is a stubborn bird that nestles where it's not expected - a moss that secretly grows in a démodé house.

in my nightmares, mornings take over darkness where icicles drip down by ingesting the beauty of my mother's house - there's a bullet in my coffee hiding to obey.

today, I watch a petal desert from a flower & the flower mournfully buries it at the riverbank - we call it scientific method of escaping unwanted things.

the more I try chasing life out of me, the more it keeps sprouting fresh daffodils in the soil that governs my heart, that this body of mine is a work of God & it's not ready to become a food to homeless termites.

actually what do I know? what do I know about management of fate? what does a happy boy know about death? what does a river know about dryness?

tomorrow, won't I pluck a bird from sky & gossip into its ear: wherever you see God, tell him a boy is here waiting like the dead hand of a clock seeking miracles from rain?

Olalekan Hussein (Nature) is a young Poet who studies in a prestigious Arabic institution in Lagos, Nigeria, Darul Falah. He has works published & forthcoming in: Brittle Paper, African writer Mag, Third Lane Mag, Livina press, Rigorous Mag, Kreative Diadem & other mags.