EREMITE POETRY

REDEMPTION

Olalekan Hussein
tonight, let's imagine I'm in our family’s garden
                                                 trying to entomb some monochrome memories inside a half-broken flower pot
                                                  like a woman buries her newly vomited fetus' placenta out of sight;
let's pretend I was not pained when death
                                                                                             sneaked into our home & plucked the most ripened fruits in our garden,
                                                                               the favorite hairs that sketched sweet smiles in our wrinkled faces like a maquillage
                                                                 & the favorite songs that tickled our buttocks into a dance.
let's pretend & pretend & pretend till our eyes are a coast empty of water.
 
tonight, I wish to go to a holy place where light can
embrace me out of silhouette—where I can knot water
                                                                           without the fear that it could s-h-a-p-e-s-h-i-f-t into an elegiac one—where I can weep tears that
                                         
will be christened as tears of joy—where I can repose in grace & not grave—where I can sing
                                                                                                                      songs of joy that won’t sound
                                             
like a dirge or rend my mouth into shards—where I can dance to my favorite songs
                                         without the fear that my legs would be pallbearers to journey me home.
 
again, let’s imagine I am going to revisit my old English textbook
                                             where suffix looks like a friar’s calligraphy, so I can prefix re+demption to substitute doldrums with an eternal redemption.
                                              & as a nightingale, songs of joy will flow out of my larynx like cascade.
 
Picture
BIO: 
Olalekan Hussein, NGP VI, is an emerging poet who writes from Lagos, Nigeria, where he studies in an Arabic/Islamic institution, Darul Falah. an aspirant of the University Of Ibadan. He finds joy in Literature as he sees it as a surgery to calm himself. A Best Of The Net Nominee with works published & forthcoming in: The Shallow Tales Review, Brittle Paper, Third Lane Mag, Rigorous, Aster Lit, Lumiere Review, Fiery Scribe Review, amongst others.
Find him on:
Twitter @Waliullah_06
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