ROUND THE CLOCK; a tale of (be)coming

By Olaitan Humble

Two moons to come, the monsoon grabs
our land by the neck, strangles it and 
returns it to us in shambles.
           In another forecasting, my friend's
sister returns home
from the riverscape with 
a huge basin affixed to her
belly by unscrupulous passivity—
unsuspecting & bewildering.

The cowries are still getting tossed, divine;
browns here, browns there, of calabashes
& animal skins. We watch as the priest
humbly seeks the tenderness of our mutes,
our oracles. He says they speak louder
but we do not listen. We respect him 
for he claims he hears their mutters.
          Earlier, Father had spoken the language
of the land to his seeds before 
planting them into the deep roots
of life. He held them in a wrapped 
paper for too long just so they may
not lose their ways. Now the seeds
crawl out of the soil into the vast
wilderness by the riverscape reaching
the king's gate. Father says the seeds
are unashamed latecomers to stained 
slates, clothed in thobes covering their
endowment; the ways of the land of ways.

He
      b r e a k s
his knuckle bones, washes his head atop
the town river before his anger lights a
fire upon his home. The fire eats up all
herns of the abode leaving behind only
smokes & ashes of the wall clock in his 
stead, the only adornment hanging by the wall.

                            He holds a pack of
                            dust on his nail tips,
                         proving
                            there is a browner earth
                            than the one we know. We

      all believed the earth
      was green until came
      the long lasting breeze

shaking us 
from beyond
our horizon
& each day
forward, we
lose strands 
of our hairs,
bands of our
color to a
land eaten up.

Olaitan Humble is a Nigerian poet and pacifist who likes to collect quotations and astrophotos. He won the People's Choice Award at Earnest Writes Poetry Prize Awards 2020 and JustDeen Poetry Contest 2020. Poetry Editor at Invincible Quill Magazine and Features Writer at GABI Magazine, his works are featured and/or are forthcoming in Crêpe & Penn, Wine Cellar Press, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Giallo, AGNG Mag, CỌ́N-SCÌÒ, Doubleback Review, The African Writers Review, Ngiga Review, Cultural Weekly, EroGospel, Konya ShamsRumi, POEMIFY, the QuillS, The Wanderlust Literary Journal: Timeless & Infinite, First Gong Anthology and Boys Are Not Stones Anthology II, among others. He tweets @olaitanhumble.