Resurrection
By Dare Tunmise
I don’t know who filled the roof of this house with
fertile eggs,
But the crows now are hatching in moist nests and
I’ve had my body filled with the blood of dead moths
My mother is sitting here she’s not the
One
There are tears in my sisters’ eyes they
are not crying
My father said live before his shadow disappeared
into the white beam of a doorpost
Meanwhile the guardian angel has left
the house foot swollen with grief
Meanwhile I’m crossing the ocean on a boat built
with egg shells and the feathers of quails
The thing about passing out is how you keep
thinking you have never left,
Drifting into the sea with the songs of relatives standing at the
bank waiting for the dead to navigate its own arrival
In the hospital,
I woke up sneezing and my lids came heavy with half-formed
memories
If the doctor was to sigh it would be displayed as the EKG
graphing towards rough angles
On a normal day I would have smiled
and tell him death is only a silence prolonged by rivers
I am not sure if the nurse fixing the drip asked if they’ve
renamed the last sea after God.
There’s a new sun rising in my mother’s face as a child coughs himself
out of sleep
And there’s no word to tell the prayer on her lips or the depth of her whispers
to my ear that her palm has been holding fire for my body to mend of its broken stitches.
Dare Tunmise is a Nigerian Poet and Essayist. His works have been published or are forthcoming in the Kalahari Review, The Nigerian Tribune, African Writer, Akewi Arts House and elsewhere. He currently lives and writes in Ibadan and could be found on Twitter @dare_tunmise.