SEPIA
Journeying through Abeokuta one morning, a fleet of motorists sped out of the jam and soaked the air in reckless dust. An hour later, I came across a suicide scene: a silent woman wavering on the bridge.
A dawn of dim feathers; the road spat
Loud, a new mist of robot chaos
Where limbs were groves of lust, rouse
Beneath throngs of screech and curse
A faint dark in the wind, not voice-froths
Whom the morning had made all one with the soft
Receding shadow, stale shafts of night
The highway split is rounded by dwarfs, double-tiered
And strange procession on the flick of time
Offers a brown-rimed brew—of a lone sheath freed
From presences nocturnal, brown-eyed, brows brown
Shaped by the saddened hour. The light awaited harvest
Of the winding breeds when air was brown,
Brown as furrowed bricklayer beard shrivelled off
The brown-wings of the sun
Brown season it was—nostril
Draws breath in dew-wet ash, eternal to the soul…
Eternal to me comes the brush of feet
In sweet sprint of gore-shone death,
Sepia
Photo credit – Pelumi Kayode
But it arose—
A strange image, when yet I saw
Sudden form at the haze
Of death’s brown consul, slouched
Despair of moth-plagued fur at embrace
Of the lingering guardian trough, silent as the world
And in that moment broke her tear of libation,
First reaper of the dust to time’s scorn,
Pale-eyed of the blurry dome… yet such
Startled pause at the hem she knew
Now the trench teems with grief,
Joyful rite from the vicious deep
Brown was I, then, witness though
I spied the world through her eyes,
A human will indifferent to the hour’s passion
Shrunk in my ears, rose rueful
The imprecations of all humanity…
Woman, you must stretch out
Like the sky. And shred your soul
ABOUT THE AUTHOROyin Oludipe lives and writes in Nigeria. He is the recipient of the 2013 WRR Poetry Beacon Prize. His poetry, essays, and reviews have been featured or are forthcoming in Radar Poetry Journal, The Guardian, Afrikana.ng, Africanwriter.com, Arts and Africa, Akewi Arts House, The Provo Canyon Review, The Bombay Review, Image Magazine of the University of Ibadan, and others. In 2015, he was a judge for the Green Author Prize, a literary award for young unpublished poets in Nigeria.
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