Someone Is Coming & Other Poems – Omobola Osamor

Someone Is Coming

I had a dream that a half-grinning moon cradled the sun.
Trapped in mud, twin confluences
funnelled smoke up my nose, pressed on all sides.

Windows were broken behind torn curtains.
Hiding crying children,
rotten corpses plugged once fresh springs. 

Running through abandoned pot-holed streets,
screaming through gutted walls,
an excavation where my heart once danced.

The crowd grew, voices chorused
ramping up to a frenzy,
drawing them from hiding.

We held hands, forgetting tribe and religion,
and broke ranks with bigots. In war,
we all lost.

Discarding those who gained from division,
discarding lies, we saw each other,
dug out palliatives hidden behind guns.

Hunger didn’t discriminate against our flesh, 
cup in hand, we’re screaming to deaf ears,
we’re slipping in brethren’s blood.

We sit in darkness spurned from power lines.
Flayed cheeks wobbling over bleeding gums,
fumes breeding death along coastlines. 

We watch them fight to be born,
hemmed in by our wrappers,
laboriously panting.

Our voices are joined by others,
our chants reach the sky,
our parched lips are watered.

Someone is coming who won’t butter bread with blood.
Someone is coming who won’t butter bread with blood.
Someone is coming who won’t butter bread with blood.

Waiting

behind broken windows
held hostage in the present
sweaty crowns carry scars
crucible of the past

waiting
on roads slick with blood
potholes — excavating with hunger
rat-a-tat of guns to ease

votes to count

waiting
for dawn to usher naira notes
from broken ATMs
sneering slogans of not the same old
bleeding shins beneath empty market stalls

waiting
for ASUU & SSANU strikes to end
medical personnel depart
dirges on repeat at home 
while they coast off abroad

waiting
for tribes not to bring suspicion
names not to bring derision
religion not to mean death

waiting
for African children to stop
pilgrimage across deserts
seas to stop heaving corpses
sand grains along shores

waiting
for the sun and wind
to give grass to crowd banks
fossil dependence to wane
flora and fauna to thrive.

waiting
for collective tears to cease
for the birth of today in the departure of yesterday
hope for a tomorrow

The Watchers

From the tower, 
they watch the conquered
through muddy lenses.

They have rules:
no speaking with subjects
no touching
no letting their hair glide through your fingers
no looking into their eyes
— seeing pupils,
colour fragmenting irises — 
no breathing the same air
no catching their decay
pour through broken teeth
and parched lips. 

They communicate through others who jolt, 
prod and erode to keep things sane. Others too far away
to experience their masters’ spring, but close enough
to spy them awaken to sun kisses, close enough
to see them slick in summer dew, close enough 
to salivate, but too far away to touch. 

They did their masters’ bidding; 
gauged the masses with sugary treats
— riding on their collective high, 
skipping over yawning tartar,
guttered gums, and bleeding cavities —
they chased this singular thread:
to shimmer from fresh showers,
eat carrots trapped in picket fences, 
ears stopped in cement, sorry, jewels,
immune to corpses underfoot; 

they followed a singular thought:
to breach the perimeter, inhabit utopia,
to be on the other side. Because no one lives forever, 
succession bridges the gap. Once ensconced within,
new watchers learn to speak in clicks,
learn to explore like lovers, searching for a response.
They learn the alchemy of wrapping poison in molasses,
of funnelling flowery words through short and long waves,
and watch the masses swallow. In the gilded cage,
watchers are always awake.

Blue

Blue is the chiffon dancing circles around your feet, kissing your skin; 
the buy one gets one free slip-on cradling your feet that stayed youthful through the ages.
Buy one, get one free, as mothers bear one, and the other arrives scratched and bruised,
balled fists fighting; she arrives and stays.

Blue is the uniform playing checkers beneath a tears-drooped umbrella;
the plastic chipped chair in the corner swimming in hot Milo.
Blue were the petals of his towel she ripped in half,
tracks gathering an ocean beneath her lips, drowning his bones. 

Blue is the glow of our bodies spilling through your window,
limbs locked and swallowed in whispers beneath humid skies.
Blue, the cocoon I crept in and stayed as you were carried away through parting waves,
its ink bleeding into each chapter, lines echoing scabs atop old wounds.

Blue are the walls of this new ill-fitting shirt, chipped nails, clawing my skin.
Blue are these choppy syllables on repeat, screams through shadowed orbs.  
Blue, the sky on which I sit and the shores on which I arrive. It’s the threshold we meet,
beholding each other’s faces, where house meets home, where home comes to stay.

Omobola Osamor is a writer and poet born in Lagos, Nigeria. Her poems and fiction have been published in several publications and anthologies, including Japa Fire: An Anthology of Poems on Africa and African Diasporic Migration, Brittle Paper and African Writer. She co-edited From Here To There: 101 Poems on African and African Diasporic Migration, CivicLeicester and is on the board of the Africa Migration Report Poetry Anthology Series. She lives in Illinois.

*Image by Zahra Hosseini on Unsplash