Threnody for hope

Chinedu Gospel, Nigeria

I wonder why some hands can hold hope
When some cannot even hold themselves
–Mayowa Oyewale

deep down / nobody wants to let go / deep down / a broken soul / believes it can be wired into a new body / when it is dark / we keep treading / through the body of a wall / searching for a shadow / when it is dark / we keep our eyes open / expecting a Bethlehem star / i sit in the warmth of winter / the sun accommodating its own grief / i sit by the cave of my body / birding an anthology of psalms / & every song was a blade / that carved a different memory out of my bosom / & yes there was no pain / in the bleeding / there was no death in losing too much blood now / those memories that kept vowelling through my veins / there was no grave / to hide myself / from those fears i'd been trying not to look directly in the eyes / i remembered how i kept running to grandma's grave / hoping to find it broken / the coffin empty / how i kept staring at the sun / hoping it would turn another earth / where night would never occur / what is hope / if not the art of staring into an empty sky / in search of god / like we do in our prayers

Winter Speaks of Bloom

Chinedu Gospel, Nigeria

if the scar unbecomes a mirror,
then, the body has become a winter sun.
rays, a needle treading the shorelines
of water. in this poem, i feature my
mother as a metaphor for open flesh.
& i am salt loving her into a fine texture
of pain. they say the only way to go through
fire and not burn is to go as air. only when
you're that close to invisibility. when nothing
sees you, not even the eyes of the sun.
i inhale the smoke & in my lungs,
it condenses into rain.

conclusion: healing begins inside our breath.

in the morning, i break with sunrise
in my tongue, my mouth too hot, it sweats
a waterfall of elegies – i have sang more for things
alive than dead. say, my ache – a colony of leeches
sprouting from different countries in my body.
say, i am a bat snailing away from the
darkness of my own eyes.

conclusion: a broken body can repairs itself

rhyme me, i sound like the word saviour for i have
survived the books of my body – every page
of me swiped open by a blade & read in the greek
of agony. life is a big farce until you learn
about resurrection. i read the gospels & found
a man walking on water. & i began to drown
in unbelief. like death, life is beginning to make
sense. because every time, i stare at the sun
from a wintry cloud, it plummets into my eyes
under a gravity only my body can name. the
science of matter. proof that a condition heavy
enough to pull down apricity resides inside me.

conclusion: there is a white way to die a blue death.

Chinedu Gospel, frontier IV, is a Nigerian poet who writes from Anambra. He's the moderator for spoken word poetry at thresposs poetry. His works have appeared in Afro literary magazine, Kissing Dynamite, The rising phoenix review, Midway journal, Agbowo magazine, Feral poetry & many others. When he's not writing, he's either playing chess or listening to Aurora's playlist. Meet him on twitter @gospel79070806 and IG @gospels.