you long to call this dark place home
the horrors of the past can’t cloud the yearning
you plough the hard ground until something can grow on it
because you are reborn here something else could,
there’s a shimmer, yellow dustings of light in the passage that joins this room to a more penetrating darkness
many are called in it
not all that are called can answer
you only hear that
which in a tangled rush surrounds you with
the urge to know more and how other way there is to see
than out through the gauze that make grey meshes on the wall like a crystal melting in the dark
you fail to see time as it moves forward
interpreting time as it never moves
the tall dark pillar that fights to shield itself against invisibility
the sound of things rushing and leaving you behind until all that’s left to care is the soft comfort of the room.
Wilson Ajima lives in Enugu, Nigeria. He is a teacher, a student, and a writer of poems and stories.