Odukoya Adeniyi | Ballads Of Bullets & Bombs | Poets Resist

Odukoya Adeniyi is an undergraduate studying English and Education at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. His poems have appeared/ forthcoming on Roadrunner review, Kissingdynamite, Kalahari Review, Praxis magazine, Feral; journal of poetry & arts, and elsewhere. His poem "Food is Peace" was a winning poem at PIN Food Poetry Prize 2018.

Also by Odukoya Adeniyi: Two Poems Aubade to My Dead Father Questions to a Poet

Poets Resist
Edited by Elizabeth Ruth Deyro
July 28, 2020

Odukoya Adeniyi

Ballads Of Bullets & Bombs

We are gathering each carcass inside a prayer sack, a woman is eulogizing a god that couldn’t save her husband, she reminds me of flower petals trying to rinse loss off their lips, the sky is the loudest woman at night, gathering all the bullets from her bruises into the fog of our clamber for the gullet of safety, the weeping girl in my dream is my dead child's future, She was so strong that the explosion didn’t make her scream, though, she became invisible & empty of the prayers nailed inside her voice. the wind is bland, today. I can see every ghost in its loneliness, victory isn't latched onto after death, death is the lone part of an Imagination trailing obscurity with questions dangling around its ankle. the earth is the sandal of vanity, our bodies break into the mirror of a threshold, plunging after all that isn't our becoming. my body is the mouth of a drowning bird; trying to sing into the face of a water encircling its desertion, the city is the gawk of a broken star praying for a night that isn’t in love with the ballads of bullets and bombs.