A Red Deity

Cold voyage on a splintered blade,
A passage through silt.
You'll pump my turquoise veins
With mud coloured life
And deck my raw feet in breathing iron.
The messenger on steed of

Gossamer wings saying,
I come to wet your thirsty tongue
With diesel from the pit.
I'll light up your cage with twinkles
From the dark forest.
A poem that should not be spoken.
Sweetness that must only be glimpsed.
Would you unlock your pale gates?
I bear urgent tidings.

The sky burned a deep red,
On an unremembered day.
Something has come to haunt and
To save us from this heat,
Like the tall masquerade we used
To call danger as children,
Bearing on us with bright machete
And a thing we never grasped.
Our smile is beautiful like

The velvet covering of an

Old key that would open no door,
Splendid like new pride.
The man in white suit, white shoes said
Lack is a defiler. I know.
I hate the way he says it,
But you should have seen the barefoot Little boy spit blood-specked saliva
Then dash off after indifferent buses And self absorbed travellers,
A tray of groundnuts on his head.
Winds fall around us too, like the blaze.
The people need their opium,
Until the sea is here.

They said the author of our woes

Had borne gifts of redemption on soft Palms and wore heavy boots under 

Long white cassocks.
I must be prejudiced in

Favour of colours.
But I have never encountered

A Caucasian
Except the young man in camouflage
Who offered me a crisp
Fifty naira note on a passenger boat,
When I was a child.
I liked him.
But mama said, don't receive

Things from strangers.
Beke-ere. She would not blink

At the bolts of lightening that fork 

Across her pea shaped face.
Home is an inconvenient errand.
The cupboard is perfumed

With emptiness.
This other pirate would take
You to the hedged fruit by

The simple spell in a new dress or
Perhaps, a chickenpie's milk.
Our children do not know_ yet
As they trot cheerfully to dine

On naked soup that there is another Who is not ma or grandma.
All but the few in their barb wire nests
And high feathered caps are
Bruised against the smoke and
The stone left by the rape.
We do not know that there is

More to this saga.
You would show it sometime, maybe.
But we know the colour
Of red is blood,

Like a rose,
Like everything else here.

                     By Tenane

Photo Credit: 

Wallpapers wide.com