Think of The River as a Mouth Wide Open

A boy standing on its lips, a boy so still you could mistake him for a reed but his head does not gently bob to the gale’s music & there are no reeds growing here. So still you could mistake him for the pause preceding a prayer. His arms folded across his chest, a tribute to crossbones—foreshadow of what is to come, plaudit to the pain which possesses the present like grape juice eating white tunic in a show of fuchsia power. His folded arms will not let you see dusk wheeling itself across heaven’s freeway or a finch tearing a wound across the sky’s face with song & flame-tipped plumage or even the sun garbed in a gown of orange plummeting to its recurrent death with a ballerina’s grace—Icarus’s fall seen in slow motion; his lips kiss the water before any feather. You will not think of the day retreating into the cliff-edge trees as a boy stands on the lips of a river, shrouded in silence and smog, a vulture bedraggled in its lightning-struck garment in the aftermath of a prayer that will never be answered. The smoke of an offering burnt to a nose-less god swirling into his ears. Think of the river as a mouth wide open, a boy on its lips like a hesitant lover, a boy so still you mistake him for a dead thing or a thing poised to kill. Whichever. That boy’s face coaxes an open mouth into song and the river gifts him something holding the shadow of a grave between its teeth. Hear the raindrops kissing the headstone, hear the tufts of grass nestled between stones on a gravelled footpath, hear as the wind rustles them, look far into the night at the silence of a mouth made heavy by the weight of dead things, the silence of a river slick with oil, the silence of fish floating belly-up. Yesterday, the father returned with an empty boat, calloused hands & stories of a time the delta strained at its seams from the weight of fish. Tell me how every gas flare in this land is a finger flipped at the face of God, the wooden masks mocking every empty stomach & every retching throat with plastered laughter. What is the delta if not water slashing its wrists to bleed blessedness? What is the river if not blessedness itself trickling into an open palm? But think of the river as a mouth wide open—nestling a sullied tongue & all the barbed lingo of loss: acid rain, benzene, corrosion, depletion of fish populations. The boy standing on its lips at the height of young sorghum. but no tassels adorn his head, just scabs & hair the colour of dying metal. Because sorghum does not grow here because nothing grows here. Not even boys whose standing is an elegy to wings draped with oil.

Written By Onyekachi Iloh

2024