Image by Bartek Zakrzewski from Pixabay
HOMECOMING Father’s house used to be a sweltering chalice of riven harmony Where dreamlands are but marshy playgrounds for wounded kids We could have played football but for the boys who found a map And shadowed its contours to a captured town, below blue feet When our hearts sheltered young demons in their guest rooms We found salvation in lanky rawhides, punitive like nursing dogs And cloudbursts of proverbs come sweeping away their cadavers The ones we left decomposing outside the gates of dead memories Mother’s arms used to be a prayer city, a holiday resort for crazy boys And girls trying to bring home conquered gods, drunk in cupid’s rum.
This kitchen once seduced seraphs, looking in longings for her amiedi
And the perfumes from elderly pots pregnant with liquid happiness Mother’’s mouth was the bank of a river where we sat picking seashells Of beautiful dreams, listening to songs of the river birds like serenades But today I come finding home like a morsel in the mouth of silence Memories swallowing the map of a burnt country alongside its flag Earth sustaining new wounds from the mounds cuddling her kindred Mother! your children are still searching for the map to a wrecked home While salvaging your lover’’s name from the fragments of a burning flag
Franklyn Orode is a creative writer from Nigeria. He is a graduate of civil engineering from the University of Benin. He sees poetry as a way of finding momentary escape from the vicissitudes of life. Franklyn’s works have been published on Eboquills, SprinNg, poetry cooperative, PIN, WRR and elsewhere. He is the curator of the covid-19 themed poetry anthology “EARTH ON A WHEELCHAIR” and also the author of “ASHES OF ORANGE DREAMS” his first published poetry collection. Franklyn writes from Lagos and wherever his engineering practice takes him.