Necromancy

In the dark warm mouth of the earth,
a language festers from disuse.
My padi jokes I bury my pulsating mother-
tongue—six-feet beneath the earth’s surface
—at every vain attempt at speech.

Bí ewé bá pẹ́ lára ọṣẹ…

I confess: my mouth is both
soiled & the soil. Between my vile dentition
a tongue recoils from rain, & runs
into ruin—from frying-pan into the fire.
O’ jeweled dialect of my mother
rattling against my molars.
Honey-dipped ancestral tongue
tugging betwixt incisors. Unforked
speech-bud dancing in its casket.
Clawing out of its grave.

Sing me a dirge sonorous enough to awaken
a mummy—to exhume a skeleton,
reincarnate a soul—without
summoning its ghost.

…á di ọṣẹ

Mint leaf sticks to a soap bar
for so long it disintegrates
into the soap. Once,
in my uncle’s garden, we buried
a peacock without a coffin.
Two harmattans after, the unmarked
grave spot thrives with lush flowers.
Oluwa, how long before
a flowery bird biodegrades into a flowerbed?

In the dark warm mouth of the earth,
a 6-foot-deep wound rescinds
into a small cut. Bones wear the flesh
again like sheathed swords.
Language, a seedling
falling on the rockside, refuses to be
planted, & still does not wither.
I render a phrase in Yoruba, &
the canary’s song does not die
in its hollow syrinx.