“They say nothing lasts forever, and I’m writing you in the voice of an endangered species.”  Ocean Vuong.

My grandmother died in the sea here, at the bottom of the sloping cliffs, where I, too, like a bleeding chariot, has come carrying the histories of my ancestors, as squirrels carry the bodies of their wounded kittens into liquid boats, to pick out bullet stones buried in their broken intestines. In this camp of love and heartbreak, every minute that passes holds you and me in the speed of doomsday submarines, mama. How long do birdsongs wait in cold night trains in search of free passenger airplanes for us to go home? Every wall I've ever leaned on to ask god to turn our pains into night stars still comes back to haunt me, in a dream of grace and bomb craters burying themselves underneath my oesophagus. To say happiness in this valley of skeletons, what really does it mean, if not a complex sentence of how a war begins and  ends and keeps beginning again& again? That in the swollen depth of anguish, is still our tears lingering on moonshine's cadavers . I retreat into my coven of blood rains, and watch how the powers trapped in these oceans lift us, watch  how everything we have mistakenly named lightning comes back to tear down our countless humiliations, carve our brittle ruins into butterfly wonders. Wherein every escapes to hide rivers inside them, behind thick dark forests. Somewhere, amongst the frangipani woods of harmattan, my brain neurons cringe as I try to lower all the flames burning inside away; gathering the bones of my countrymen, women and children, all those whom I couldn't save during yesterday's bomb blast, at the refugee camps. I've seen the moon and sun turn to desert sands, spoken in low tones like a dying old woman, hoping to uncoil every rage trying to steal her leftover life into a grave behind: a grave so shallow and neat that it growls in flashbacks, till joy, a remedy for missing things, dug a well of songs. Every night, I wish that all the aches stuck long enough in this heart melt away into drugged holes, but the memories of a long civil war always break into my dark room every night and snatch my body into  lakes of dehumanizations. But I've learnt a dream is what it means to haunt after your own flesh in the middle of burning, to still stand breathing out fragments of guns while you watch your own city of indented existence hold the laughter of flying zombies into polythene bags. Where every fight sometimes to forget ruins, must first begin and end you in a sea of both hope and hiding place. Today, my rooms are filled again with rotten dragons from the elm trees of nightmares. And nothing left to hold our hands again on this watery height, mother. Nothing else left but this poem I write to you, which kindles nothing in me but deep sorrows, mockeries, fires unchained from the belly of darkness. Yet, I know     

someday, 

                                        somewhere 

between that sunshine &

dawn, your lights will come to take me back home, 

Mama.  

Onyishi Chukwuebuka Freedom is a Nigerian. A graduate of the Department of English and Literary Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He served as the Publicity Secretary of Muse 51, a journal of creative and critical writing established by Prof. Chinua Achebe in 1963. A His work has been published in Muse and elsewhere.