MIRACLE MOUNTAIN
by Timi Sanni
Winner of the 2022 Kreative Diadem Annual Creative Writing Contest (Poetry Category)
with a line adapted from Samuel A. Adeyemi’s ‘Flight’
In the same heat with which I’ve forged my convictions,
they bend now. This is one poem for pain. The fire roars,
the jungle suddenly comes of age, the unalloyed
metal of faith, proud, resists the silver hands of change.
But here are the grey hands of heaven’s blacksmith.
And here is the sweet silence of God. Over the mountains,
already, I can hear the loud hammering of hunger
on the belly of the knife. The question is: how
do I salvage the wrecked steel of my heart from the red
of an unholy war? How do I redeem the godly fang
of a blade that would rather break than bend
back to sickle? The consensus here, among the stony gods,
is that there is no ballad for the castaway; no song,
no dagger curving crooked, short of grace. And if the Fates
have spoken. If the loom keeps on telling its stories
of strength, who am I to ring the final bells of chance?
Here, once again, I am singing to the rocks that made me;
to the fire that burns still in the heart of stars.
The small tool of my heart, rusted as it is, remembers
that old song of grace. Tonight, we sing ourselves anew.
