I’ve been a whirlwind pelting after you
for the doing of the needful . Now i sit my kneels on the stoop,
hands raised in submission. The thing I baptized needful scuttled
into blaze-filled crucible & morphed to behemoths. It’s now a
longing tucked in the nub of crypt – gashed , mashed & comatose.
remember the cantata we hum as we cortege towards the cemetery?
that requiem we don’t want the tongue to kiss because it tastes like
hell-coated spikes ? It’s what my desire morphed to .
A lion-clawed griffin guzzling blood , fresh breathing blood. That is the grief my
patriotic crave became. We were two mothers who buffeted brows on the
jagged face of an arroyo averring to shape-shift to tiger-faced
cyclones & skate after our Moscow-based daughters who heaved
roots into exile till they inverse to the biome of beginning.
Vershima – the daughter who threw her Nigerian name into the belly of an ocean
& gave herself the name extracted from the country dancing in the mouth
of war, your co-nomad, succumbed to the furnace her mother placed on
her tongue , flied home in eagle-shaped glider with her kids,
Olimpiada & Yelizaveta. After a jubilant throng spewed dances mirroring
lateral undulation, shared brunch smelling like milk mined from Iyenge, in
honor of the wealth that reached home , cow people , cow elves parted the
hedges , gilded into Yeletewa , tucked two hundred people in jaws of preening
hooks & drew stars & crescents on a boulevard’s face with blood & blasted
skulls. Russia did not butcher our daughter, it was home that plunged Vershima
into catacomb… it’s home that grinded our foreign buds to potshards .
Doshima, I raise my hands in submission remain in the foreign realm , coming
home is now a journey into the throat of leviathan . Home
has stepped into the mouth of coffin. Benue is burning . Part my lips
with hurricane & tuck razor blades in my throat if i hurtle
after you again.
Godwin Obaji
Godwin Obaji is a Nigerian poet and Script writer. His poems have appeared in Blasphemous, Penned in Rage Literary Magazine, Okiti Literary, Kalahari Review, Teambooktu, Tuck magazine and Ebedi Review. His poem made the Finalist of 2018 Uganda Babishainiwe Poetry Prize. His Haiku poem made the Finalist of 2017 Uganda Babishaiku Prize. He's two times winner of 2022 POETREE Poetry Prize. His Poem appeared in Soil Unfurling From Stem ; An Anthology From Sub-saharan Africa, edited by Bridgette James . His poems were Longlisted for 2025 Kayode Aderinokun Poetry Prize and 2025 Brigitte Poirson Literature Prize. His poems diagnose grief & cast conduits for its banishment. He Currently studies Political Science and international Relations at the University of Abuja.
