THE ROAD HOME
The road home is full of dusts, on your way back you would learn to take
Those classes you fled from, lessons of patience, how to marry the chaos softly,
How little could mean bounty sometimes; a glimpse of rain curing the earth of thirst
And how bounty could be so little, its excess causing it a flood, you would thank
Every warner at every border, you would learn to change
Their names, you had put in their pockets some shards of poetry which asks
Them; what do you know of leaving, of things turning ashes, what do you know of
A burning country, what do you know of crimson griefs and dooms we carry
Like birth mark? As a payback you put in their pockets; shillings, for the works they rendered
To void, shillings your country have outgrown them like childhood clothes, your still
Thinks of your country in old currency, you still name the patriots beggars, idle men
Who enjoyed elegy, who stand by the borders watching who leaves and who do not.
On your way back, you would pick nostalgia, old photographs, family portraits before insurgency,
A spring of memories will visit you, places of graves, echoes and the gathering place that
Now has become a city, all gratitude to the machines, the one who created it
The one who created them all, the flesh from the earth and the ore. Also
You would meet are lizards telling you what you left now grow a thousand mouths
And their hunters telling you; we kill them safeguarding the emptiness you left behind
The only man that is left in your village would tell you how everyone left but the pigeons,
Then you would realize that the voices calling you thousands of miles away
Are not home’s but that of the walls, calling you to this place of echoes
An emptiness now ruled by silence, before you go back, check on your uncles,
Their graves growing mysterious roses, pluck some and show to friends- a grief-begotten leaves.
Tell them the place of your birth has called you to grieve with her, how dust fills the spaces of sons.
Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo is a Nigerian poet, & a Veterinary Medical Student, whose first love is art making. His poems were nominated for the 2021 BOTN and for the 2021 Pushcart Prize. He is an avid reader, who sees poetry in everything, with great interest in storytelling. His works have appeared, or are forthcoming in: Southern Humanities Review, Oxford Review of Books, Scrawl Place, Short Vine Literary Journal, Rigorous, Oakland Arts Review, Tipton Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, South Florida Poetry Journal, Olongo Africa, Roanoke Review, Watershed Review, Panoplyzine, Kissing Dynamite, The Night Heron Barks Review, The Citron Review, Stand Magazine, Louisiana Literature, Obsidian: Literature and Art in the African Diaspora, Welter Journal, Praxis Magazine and elsewhere. Fasasi twits @FasasiDiipo.