Self-Portrait With Pilgrimage by Chinedu Gospel
72 lines
Issue 5 (Summer 2024)
Born to the blood of an animal.
Named only after the curiosity
of what
I might become. The world was
everything, but, a dam of ruin.
My mother
says she's one-eyed, because,
I am the only son of her womb.
Says,
in the short prose of her life, I'm
both paragraph & full stop. Every
-thing
between, a dam of ruin. For fear
of ending up as a phrase in that
story,
I named the animal in me &
watched it feral into a thirsting
cat.
My claws clung unto the hem
of the silver skyline until I miracle
with the
stench of hope. The sky is no
place for cats. & how long can this
body
of furs defy gravity? How brave,
the lion of my liver? For fear of falling,
I toned
my mewing into a chirruping.
Exchanged my claws for remiges. The
sky
is no home for birds. But, starlings
are birds in the day & stars at night.
I want
to belong to their clan. A changeling
shapeshifting from murmuration
to
constellation.
I am this faraway from home
because
mother deserves everything that
waters into magic —flowers &
fruits &
a flood floating her ferry towards
a peaceful disembarking. The sky is
no home
for me. The birds, no brotherman.
So, I'll trace every footprint back
-wards,
horse my way through the prairie, &
savannahs, to the city of boys who
want
to be grazed with pulsating fingers,
& called sons. To the city of men
where
every dead man is alive in another
man. As a memory, as blood or as a gene.
The
body, in the end, a page of history.
So, I
tell the boys, first blood, to take
the wheels of their lives. & drive their
bodies
insane for every good work,
before they become clay &
molded
into flowerpots. For fear
of being forgotten, I cleave my tongues
& plant
them in their hearts. I tell them to
remember me with the songs of the
starlings
With the shimmerings of the stars.