Sunday 5 November 2017

2 Poems by Agbaakin O. Jermiah

PTSD

we do not mind death today
so that tomorrow may live.

the papers say
you'd compensate our mothers at home
andwives who fondle our absences,
elusive as shadows in full nights.

a soldier is nothing
but fingers in the trigger of a city
trying to shoot
the treasonous letters of negotiation.

so we do not mind to die
as seeds do on fields;
our blood shall be the manure.

for tomorrow, tomorrow shall live
with songs of how much I wanted to die,
that I buried a lead in my head.


SELECTING A HELL

(for Nigerian Returnees from Libyan)
a flee does set man free.
you were a jailed spittle in the lips
of a city locked in the kiss of civil wars.

home-coming is like the folly
of holding faith as if it were solid
like cookies or cheese.
your heels put a knife to the throat
of Tripoli sebaceous with petroleum.

in her dessert,
cactuses, incandescent by tropical heat
twirl gently in the peaceful breeze.
but the Beaufort operator repeats:
this breeze now is a storm.

on the Atlas,
home too, is a graffiti drawn in blood
by the brushstrokes of Jihadists
and a sloppy Media on cable.

you ignore the European salvation
above theMediterranean
for the year before now,
men became fishes with no gills
to wade to a nearby shore
from the stormy sea.


Bionote

Agbaakin O. Jeremiah, an aspiring poet and campus Editor reads law in University of Ibadan. His works have graced several publications (and are forthcoming) like Liquid Imagination, Antarctica Journal, Wagon Magazine, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Kalahari Review, Praxis Magazine, African Writer and elsewhere.




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