When the queen of a bee colony becomes too old or unproductive, the worker bees dispose of her by clustering around her in a tight ball until she overheats and dies.
─ National Geographic.

At nightfall, as always, I meet him
just at the foot of Carter bridge, legendary brown skin

catching the receding sun, his eyes
rush out to meet mine in the soft light

just before they wander off again,
far into this body of water, as if to drag the eye of the waves too, into the sunset

and beyond. Perhaps, in his head is the door of a deserted house
left unlatched, a window open to the sea upon which are stranded canoes

fastened by ropes kept supple with grease, to piers,
here in this place of waters. He searches for answers to a prayer long lost to the winds

and the still chorus of water creatures below,
running marathons, seeking to break free off the surface. Even journeying is a form of prayer.

Perhaps this wayfarer has come a long way,
shedding layers of skin already heavy with the fatigue of fleeing.

This tongue hidden in a body that has known the weight
of many morning years and now in its evening years, burdened by its own shadow.

This twisted mouth that has known love like a salmon knows
the damp air of rivers, of another man waiting for a lover who left, and never returned.

Perhaps, as his bulged eyes watch the men guide
their boats to shore, he’s thinking of the simple rituals of drowning.

How long do we have until the things that guard us start to kill us?
He rasps to his second skin, here by the seaside,

How long before the anchorman, caught in this cold twilight,
starts to choke on wedges of fading sunlight?

Chisom Okafor, Poet and Nutritionist, was shortlisted for the Brittle Paper Award for Poetry in 2018 and the Gerald Kraak Prize of 2019. His works have been published or are forthcoming in Praire Schooner, the Indian Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, Rattle, Palette Poetry, The 2019 Gerald Kraak Anthology (The Heart of the Matter), Kikwetu, The Rising Phoenix Review, The Single Story Foundation Journal, Praxis, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Brittle Paper and elsewhere. He is currently co-editing 20:35 Africa, an anthology of contemporary poetry.