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What is Another Name for Grief?
I always get flummoxed about life’s experience,
Wondering how grief has become shelters
In our household.
The horrible breeze at night wears me down
Into a saddened tomato planted at my granny’s antiquated garden.
I never let the lines of my poems too
Heavy to carry on my head into my father’s superannuated chamber,
Because, I dine and wine with grief,
And it has become my college acquaintance that accompanies me to the library of depression.
They say God didn’t predestine grief
Into our names,
Because we are not kangaroos whose abode is a gift from the elohim.
But this destruction is daunting
My belief if God truly exits in this realm.
My diminutiveness is vulnerable enough to be haunted by grief,
And this heart is too fragile to be devoured by a hungry shack.
They say green is the colour of a healthy leave,
So, what is the colour of a depressed heart
Whose happiness has been driven away by an invisible earthquake?
Blue? Yellow?
It’s a labyrinth for me to fathom.
Since mamma has rented an apartment in heaven,
And papa has become a progenitor in his coterie’s realm,
How does my snail now walk in empty stomach
Without selling its shell in dystopia of pain?
This heart is becoming fugitive,
And i do not know the other name for grief.
Farewell of Pains
Mama has once been a vessel;
Traveling on my father’s turbulence sea
annihilated by an intractable hurricane.
Mama has also slept in a bed;
Spread with bedsheet of iniquity
In my father’s abode that’s cemented with beach of wickedness.
Where aching river gushed
Out of her naked eyes every night
Like a dented plant that loses its buds.
My father became a government pestle;
Pounding my mother in a zambiza mortar.
While mother became a cattle;
Being reared in my father’s bivouac of beating.
I have now painted my gallery with mama’s images
Peering her forceful smiles after her isolation to another realm.
I think papa has forgotten death is never a town crier,
It could come tomorrow & fade him away like a melted candle.
Olalekan Hussein is a Nigerian writer, born and raised in Lagos State. He has a strong interest in literature and delves into the writing of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and other genres. He’s an acquisitive reader and a lover of nature and currently a student of a prestigious Arabic/Islamic institution in Lagos State (Darul Falahi). If Olalekan is not perusing the holy Quran and other Islamic-related books or scholars’ books, he’s definitely scribbling his pen to catalyze beautiful writings for his readers.