SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 120
RUNNER-UP — POETRY
Onyekachi Iloh
Farewell to Grief or Because It Began with an Apple Does Not
Mean It Should End with an Axe
let this be festivity a piñata someone blindly stumbling in the piazza of beauty knowing it is
within reach knowing we will [never] reach it knowing discerption
attends reaching I tell you, it doesn’t have to be about a body burning for opening its throat
into songs we don’t have to be the bench in a park awaiting the occasional arrival
of grief to warm the names of lovers carved into the coldness of its face here is a story about
the sea, take and do with it what you will let it not have drowning for a
denouement —nothing deserves to end in a flailing of arms if it is not flying
let it not end with a boat ramming into the wooden pier let it have any ending but
that in which the whole village comes out with paraffin lamps to browse the benighted face
of howling water let daybreak not find the father, head bowed and oar-arm
jaded hull chanting the adagio of decay and figurehead falling into the sea’s open mouth but
if there is a drowning if there be a tattered trysail come in with
the tide if we wring the necks of seven white hens and reveal to a knife the secret in the
humps of seven white bulls and yet the sea refuses to give up that
which it has swallowed then, let there be songs then let there be the revelrous strain of flutes
let there be the kicking up of dust in praise of that which has gone
home to thirst no more it does not happen enough, so let there be a trapping of sunlight a
little boy running into a field of flowers forefinger held out for the
velvety thorax of a monarch mouth opened to the dribbling honey of dawn and all of it—
flowers, finger and outstretched tongue—is real my friends say there are
too many flower fields in my poems really do you not tire of the cruel cackle of gunfire do
you not want to forget the last kiss—harbinger of being led away into
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