VACANT - By John Chizoba Vincent

For the girl who went. 

Emptiness stares in blank pages, 

another dirge written in torment.

Your face I never know how pretty

it was but you came with a shaped cry.

What eyes will watch my large mouth, tell this? 

What heart will be sober with this tears

to my attractive tears, to my wild cry? 

You never did pity me but left like Ogbanje, 

left without another faint cry to my ears. 

That night I picked up the spade to dig your grave, 

that night my throat cracked and men's tears

grew in their eyes like tumour in the heart;

that night I arranged those broken letters on your grave, 

I remembered you were just three days old-

I remembered the name I said I will call you. 

If I cry roughly of this pain, my heart would reject me.

In a spreading fluttered sack I put you, 

Why don't you grow up to be buried in a decorated coffin? 

May the wind never be in peace with you for 

leaving this lyrical web of agony in me. 

May the land of the spirit reject you at the gate

for this indispensability of Human suffering. 

Come see mother in tears of her grandchild... 

Come see father sewing his old anthem together. 

I have a dream of making you the world's flag,

a jargon of a new dialect among men. 

But no more!  No more this banner of love! 

Under the spilt milk of the moon, 

across the line of straighter darker trees, 

as my soul rises and birth many colours... 

I will dance no more in the street like girls 

on hands and knees that throw their hair

for the breeze to see it nakedness. 

When I embarked on this journey,

You promised to stay with as we spoke in dreams. 

Now, the only palm fruit is lost in the fire,

A vacant created link a sour wound. 

Fragment of another me emerged confused. 

Turn again I will after this storm you caused is over. 

©John Chizoba Vincent

          Cam'god.