In My War Songs & Other Poems
Erinola Daranijo
Love in Biafra
You take the lantern with the last kerosene
and meet me at the broken radio tower, where it’s quiet,
where the war is only distant thunder. I like how the light
trembles, how it drags itself against the mud walls.
I like how we can’t see the ribs beneath our skin.
You hold my boned hand in your boned hand,
and we walk past the cassava rows that will never ripen.
I love you because your voice is soft, because we eat
red maize and you tell me about home,
how your father buried yams before the soldiers came.
And we are dressed in longing, in our cleanest
wounds, the dust patted from our bare feet
until they gleam. Our stomachs groan, our bones
press against the skin like bayonets, but no longer
are we careless, like those men who swore the war
would end before the next harmattan.
And we go not to the dance halls but to the empty schoolhouse,
where we crouch low, lean close
to the blackened chalkboard. You shed your fears first,
lips dry and peeling, and we share that same
rotting air, press our mouths against the cold,
breathe so deeply we taste the death.
When the dust settles
After Marvellous Mmesomachi Igwe
Borno is eternal—like any other warfront—
in fire & famine. Her dust is alive, her silence, thunderclap.
Gunmetal sky, black smoke in our throats,
sermons rising, cut short.
& here, sermons are not the only things severed.
Sometimes, it is children.
Sometimes, the air—when rockets bloom—
mistaking themselves for requiems.
Tell me—tomorrow, in this dust,
will there not be another missing name?
You cannot live here, hear no guns,
& call yourself untouched.
Echoes press into us, syllables burnt onto tongues—
a charm, a relic, the iron of faith.
The war, a priest—he, the offering.
& he swelled until the field reeked
of a different kind of incense.
What the War Left Us
The town is a wound—festering, unwashed—
it breathes in fire & coughs out soot.
The harmattan wind carries voices, flayed & fevered,
names crumbling on the tongue like old bread. & who remembers bread?
The sky is split open, an unstitched belly.
Metal sings through the air,
piercing silence where silence once lived.
& here, silence is not the only thing shot.
Sometimes it is mothers.
Sometimes it is the earth, swallowing whole families.
The roads no longer know the weight of feet but of
bodies. & tomorrow, will there not be another?
Tell me—tomorrow, in this dust,
will there not be another name missing from the pot?
To live is to listen—to the hunger groaning in our bellies,
to the prayers whispered into cracked palms.
At 14, I counted the dead like cowries in my grandmother’s hands.
A boy, his eyes wide as if still searching,
as if his last thought was home.
The war called him first. It always does.
Now, in the marketplace, a woman slices okporoko on a wooden slab.
Or is it not the other way around?
The war, slicing the woman.
All the ways we have been emptied.
All the ways we have knelt,
our bodies, our brittle names.
& risen gaunt, lost, forgotten.
in my war songs
in my war songs,
nobody counts the bodies
left beneath the silence.
trace it only through the smoke
of my mouth or the ruin
in my hands. you find it
among the shrapnel of my vowels
or behind the bullet-ridden
syntax of my breath. you
smell it in the rot
of my metaphors, the echo
of boots pressed into mud. you
hear it behind
the teeth of an empty gun.
a dirge.
Prayer for the Boys Who Hold Guns Before Their First Lovers
“In the beginning, there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world.” – Ben Okri
Maybe the hands are portals,
an anti-birth, all calloused and raw.
The body unravelling from a bullet wound
beneath the left rib.
Tie your fate off with the sinew of a goat,
blood-wet and trembling.
On your knees, you cleanse your sins
with the heat of spent cartridges.
The red earth here is a long throat
leading to the river, clogged with bodies.
A prayer can be anything
used to crack open the sky
and let god fall into the dust
coating your lips, behind the rusted tankers,
under the weight of hunger.
Harmattan comes to split your skin,
razor-thin and relentless.
Soon, none of this will matter.
Your hands shake with absence
that you’ll mistake for gunpowder for a long time.
Erinola E. Daranijo is a Nigerian poet. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Akéwì Magazine and the author of the chapbooks “An Epiphany of Roses (Konya Shamsrumi Press) and “Every Path Leads to the Sea” (Ghost City Press). He splits his time between the ‘cities’ of Ibadan and Cape Town.
*Image by Dam Dam on Unsplash
