Four Poems|Grace Alioke
A Plea For Gratitude’s Face
how would my lips roll out all the
gratitude growing wings in her garden, or
how would she sprinkle all the affection
as lilies on your mild face, fair one? for
you… you, Buttercup, are the breeze
that warms my face whenever fear’s fierce
breath tries to shrink me. your fragrance alone
flutter all the butterflies in my belly till my skin
shoots praises to the sky. it’s your windless waves
that dragged me from inferiority’s cage & set me on
freedom’s lane. and when i run… when insecurity strengthens
my legs, i find myself in your embrace again, cuddling
my braids and placing my feet on the lane, and i harvest happiness
like autumn’s trees. this poem is to roll out a freckle of the gratitude
growing wings in my lips.
Mother carries the cross (every day)
Mother carries the cross
like Jesus Christ ’cause
the wandering wind has
blown Father to another woman’s laps. Mother
carries it with her skinning hands & harvests her
tears with her hands when her remains are breaking like the beak of a red-haired hen, & tugs along again. Sometimes,
she hides her tears behind her wrapper so that I won’t see the shadow of grief. But I see. I see him. I swear, I’ve seen his fierce face
but build silence into a skyscraper. Or what will we do to an iron breaking from the layers of family’s freight?
Though the cross is fuming formaldehyde from her pores
she still carries it & looks to the sky for the Simon.
Letter From Your Mother
Child
if the whirling wind roars and you shiver and
fall like a bird soaked in blood
if she blows ashes to your soul that only ode
fall from your lips
if she lunge & your fears & tears flow as
atlantic ocean
please, don’t let regrets be the
anesthesia for your skin
don’t crash hope into the concrete
for you have the might to rise again.
Question 103
she’s metamorphosing from a staled snail
to an exhausting moth, clutched to the window
& asking the wind when the streets would be free from
the indefinite imprisonment; when the day wouldn’t be measured
by the number of bodies baptized into ashes by the virus but the tick
tock; when she wouldn’t sniff the formaldehyde singing in her room, & grief
creeping into her fingers, ’cause the lockdown is scraping his touch from her dreams
& the quarantine is weaving him into distinct ant, but silence keeps hanging in her hollow head.
Photo by Andrew Dunstan on Unsplash
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