RESURRECTION OVERTURE
He traced the hum
seeping out of the ground
like a spring
to an unmarked grave.
The wind carrying the gossip of
bones from city to city.
The fate of silence
is to break. The fate of bones
is music. Our silence broke
the way a hand does,
over your name headlining an obit.
Eventually, luck is exposed
to be fate’s weaker pseudonym — the
bull in bully. He had
never imagined your body without desire,
but there you were, unsafe
as a secret in a spy’s mouth — giving in
to rot. Do you know how useless weeping is?
Get up, I whispered
as Christ did, talitha cumi, please.
You did not even flinch.
MISNOMER
I have wrestled the angel / and I am stained with light – Mary Oliver
The pigeons eat a ball of rice, roll it
between themselves atop concrete
like two kids discovering for the first
time, the thrill of soccer, kicking
an empty can of Monster to & fro their little feet.
Passing, they scatter—the birds— mistaking me
for predator. How often this happens in
my own life: an angel appears, holding in
its glittering fingers, answers to prayers
& I dissolve into screech, mistake him
as the patriarchs did, for woe: off to the table
to scribble a poem about pigeons eating
a ball of rice, forgetting how seeing a door
minutes back, I focused on its creak,
falling into normalcy, that brutish place.
Pamilerin Jacob is a Nigerian poet & editor whose poems have appeared in Barren Magazine, Agbowó, Poetry Potion, Ghost City Press, Feed Lit Mag, Neologism, IceFloe Press & elsewhere. He was the second runner-up for Sevhage Poetry Prize 2019, co-winner PIN Food Poetry Contest 2018. A Best of the Net nominee, his poems also appear in Memento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poets, 2020. He was a mentor in the SprinNG Fellowship 2018, 2019, & 2020. Author of the chapbook, Gospels of Depression, & Curator of PoetryColumn-NND, a poetry column in Nigerian NewsDirect, a national newspaper; reach him on Twitter @pamilerinjacob.