GRIEF WILL REMAKE YOU
by Ernest Ogunyemi
Grief Will Remake You – First Runner-up of the 2019 Kreative Diadem Annual Creative Writing Contest (Poetry Category)
“Grief will probably/ redraft your whole/ anatomy”
—Caroline Ebeid
I have just begun my walk out of dawn
& I have begun picking dead leaves.
I have never played so close to fire, but
hear, I know the language of been burnt.
my mother taught me, the taste of a live-coal
on a boy’s tongue, when she walked out of her body,
left it a snail shell. today, I forget the language of joy,
I forget how happiness grows into a sugary bird
filling every puff of cheek, nestling under the pave
of the tongue, hiding in the spaces between the teeth
where god decided to let air in in seeps. it is the doing
of grief. how it will gift you a new tongue, or scrape clean
the one you knew; bland every bud that knows
sweetness; fill your mouth with a new song,
the way a Mother python fills a room-corner.
tell me, what is grief itself if not the remaking of a life?
how motherless boys are pushed into a life we never chose
burning wood & Maami’s cooking & the smell of grief’s spittle
from its latest fresh at your skin fills my nose like air.
rainwater & saltwater & the buttery taste of mucus on my tongue.
the rusty bunk bed, your fragile self pressed into its bosom.
here: the sword-edge sharp coldness of your eyes,
the wilt flowers in your hair, the after-rain quiet of your body.
something in my head whispers, this might be a joke.
death does not take people when their bodies begin
to green, when they’re in their most beautiful dresses—
does it?
when does it not?
I feel the pinky of grief on the nape of my neck, its touch
cold & warm like the welcoming of a new born & the burying
of its mother. the ants on my inside roam about, they pinch,
they want. a dead bird falls from my chest & ends at the floor
of my belly. the ants gather in its belly where some bees have honeyed.
a few minutes later, the ants roam again—just as I now
roam, my legs walking me to places somebody forgot to draw
on the map. the ants on my inside now bite; they bite
everything that has a name till everything that has a name forgets
its name—what is grief if not the unbottling of hunger?—
I forget my name, too. & I forget from
where I began walking into this new life.
GRIEF WILL REMAKE YOU
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ernest O. Ògúnyemí (b. 2000) is a writer from Nigeria. Some of his works have appeared/forthcoming in Acumen Poetry Journal, Ricochet Review, Litro Print Journal, Erotic Africa: The Sex Anthology, Lucent Dreaming, Low Light Magazine, Canvas Lit Journal, Agbowó, The Nigerian Poetry Anthology (Animal Heart Press), Polyphony Lit Mag, and elsewhere. A 2019 Adroit Summer Mentee, a 2019 COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective Fellow, and a reader at Palette Poetry and a staff reader at COUNTERCLOCK Journal, he is curating the first Young African Poets Anthology, guest-edited by Nome Emeka Patrick and Itiola Jones. In 2019, he got a mini-grant to Kickstart a literary outfit dedicated solely to young African creatives. When he is not reading a book of short stories or watching the birds flying in the sky, dreaming, you can find him on Twitter @ErnestOgunyemi.
