I Will Find You

Remi Raji

Tonight my verse will find you dancing alone 
a hurricane of desires will pass me, unknown. 

And I the anchor, martyr to your trance, 
draped, in the absolution of your absence. 

You for whom I have wandered in uncertain pines 
You for whom I have sacrificed my limbs in open mines. 

You for whom I have many names...

What delights me more this very moment: 
your laughter, salty as the rain's chemistry 
on a parched tongue, or your seismic filament, 
which gives fulness to your minted mystery. 

Tonight my verse seeks you but I'm a speck of dream. 

In the middle of it all, when you are not there 
I always find you in the finesse of sand

in the sounds of stones, rivers, and in the clouds' jeer 
in the waves, in the foams and dunes of the land. 

We will not know the day but the hour will come 

in the hurricane and the dance 
in the liberty of the trance 
in this serration 
and that imagination 
all mean less than the remembrance of fire. 

It is in that hour that my verse will find you 
It is in that second that my song will fill you.

Remi Raji

Remi Raji is the pen name of Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, a Nigerian poet, scholar, literary organiser and cultural activist. Raji’s first collection of poems – A Harvest of Laughters (1997) – has won national and international recognition.