Voluntary Exile
You who ate the light of the sun at dusk
the age of your fears is in my head
I have seen the consent in your eyes
ditch thoughts have formed,
water makes a skin on your malar.
But your lover is not a goddess,
Yet she melts you into a wraith,
like the fabled water mermaid,
who fell in love with a village pauper,
she leaves food by your door at sunset
strange meals to be eaten like communal sacrifice,
to welcome bust dreams to again reinvent themselves.
I see you no longer smell suspicion
even when the dog eats your flesh,
you have become the dog in the flesh
do I hear you pray that morning should heal you,
as you are dead before death comes to take you.
I see the desks have become coffins too,
in the night of the land, fantasised lover
and leftovers of meals abandoned before flight
hurry into the ambitions you eyed before hegira.
I have entered into your ache. I can see embers
of the future cauterising your heart,
faster than the burning of a desert sun.
Tonight like every other night to come
as the wind drops down the trees,
and leaves hug and lean on fresh twigs
and branches gather strength against the wind
you embrace returnee memories in your arms,
under the shelter of tarpaulin housings
you stay awake with your biography.
Jumoke Verissimo
Jumoke Verissimo is a Nigerian poet and writer. Her first book, I Am Memory, has won some literary awards in Nigeria. Some of her poems are in translation in Italian, Norwegian , French, Japanese, Chinese, and Macedonian. She was born on 26 December, 1979
