GRACIA (un poema de Bendición Omeiza Ojo) – Palabras Rimas y Ritmo

At a point, everything in my home either burns or crumbles.
Yet, I am alive, hoping the tomorrow we dreamt of,
like a ghost, finds a perfect body to reclaim and flourish.
This truth is weightier than grief on my tongue:
My home, perhaps like yours, has been cruel to humanity.
I asked a boy, an orphan, bathing the street with waters
from his body, what led his pedigree to rest.
He said it was a bullet from a drunk policeman’s riffle.
Perhaps, on that day, his father must have gone out without
good grace. Or it was fate that turned its back at him.
However, you can’t live here without knowing the speed
a bullet travels into the body, the count of bodies
fallen and morphing into worms,
the stench of unburied bodies somewhere in the field.
You can’t build a tent here without resisting flame or tempest.
Listen, the music of guns is playing in the street next to ours.
Won’t you hide your body behind the door even though
it's not a guarantee that you will see dusk?
This country wants nothing from us but to mourn.
And sometimes, this country wants us to be silent whilst dying.
I cannot be tongue-tied when the world is not yet starved of air.
I cannot breathe without inhaling the scent of a burning roof.
Believe me: being alive to write this poem is by chance
and if I was to christen it, it’d be Grace.
It is grace that still holds your body together like a citrus
in a home where everything sweet or sour dies on earth’s tongue.

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Bendición Omeiza Ojo preside Hill-Top Creative Arts Foundation, Abuja. Ha recibido nominaciones para el Premio de Poesía Eriata Oribhabor, el Premio Creadores de Justicia, el Concurso Internacional de Poesía y Teatro Castello di Duino, el Premio de Poesía Jack Grapes, el Concurso de Poesía Brigitte Poirson y el Premio de Poesía Corea-Nigeria. Es colaborador de revistas literarias con poesía en The Last Girls Club, Deadlands, Cọ́n-scìò, Split Lip, WRR y otros lugares. Enseña escritura creativa en escuelas de Abuja, Nigeria.

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