Dozer Tread Marks Can Last A Lifetime

Onyedikachi Shaquille Johnson, Nigeria

after Africville...

When older relatives look at me

they say I talk like my grandfather

whom I barely even knew

I didn't make sense of it

until I read about the griots

& how our history lived on

the ability of these elders to recollect

I have my grandfather's stature

and rambling mouth

curved to tell anecdotes

I own a body of scars

some a repertoire of slave songs

that fell absentmindedly off the lips

of maroons who returned home with

a fear of close spaces, only that here

home is a footnote refugees wrote

into bestsellers only that here home

gets taken away along with the royalties

& others are merely dump

pits with wide open mouths

chock-full of racial slurs

When these relatives learnt I write poetry

they looked at me like missionaries

would a cathedral, glorious behind a screen

of eucalyptuses in a nation infamous for their

pagan gods and ritual killings, like I was some

delayed revelation to an age-long prophecy

How they saw me was the window

I looked through to see how much

of black history that still needed writing.

Onyedikachi Shaquille Johnson is a Nigerian writer and a medical student in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He enjoys writing poetry, but also does a little of short story writing sometimes. His works have been published in NSPP Anthologies, Brittle Paper, Itanile and elsewhere. In 2021, he was shortlisted for the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize. Aside writing, he enjoys wine tasting, evening walks, binge-reading and road trips.