Art Model on a Rooftop
By Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo
I saw the pigeon making her last hard wish, soul travelling
Through her doorless mouth, maybe friends; a bunch of onlookers
Or even kids watch her do that, her wings becoming
A music you dance with too much effort, she looks up so often
Just like us, maybe searching for mercy that would come late,
She heaves many times, just like us, may mourning all this emptiness.
I never asked a bird to be my model showing me how dying is hard
And living as a kind of elegy, my father said; nothing is easy here
And to live is to die, a bird in the claws of death,
My father undergoing the process makes me reconsider
That death is not a long-life sleep but a crash class into emptiness
And solitude. The Imaam says; death takes every step with us
And the grave is the box wherein our works are stored.
I saw the pigeon making her last hard wish, soul travelling
Through her doorless mouth, maybe friends; a bunch of onlookers
Or even kids watch her do that, her wings becoming
A music you dance with too much effort, she looks up so often
Just like us, maybe searching for mercy that would come late,
She heaves many times, just like us, may mourning all this emptiness.
I never asked a bird to be my model showing me how dying is hard
And living as a kind of elegy, my father said; nothing is easy here
And to live is to die, a bird in the claws of death,
My father undergoing the process makes me reconsider
That death is not a long-life sleep but a crash class into emptiness
And solitude. The Imaam says; death takes every step with us
And the grave is the box wherein our works are stored.
The Day I Asked to Become a Sea
At Ẹlẹ́yẹlé the local captain offered to take us across the river, he warned
That we must not shudder, & your bodies are the canoe, at the middle of a river
I saw a sea, a black girl; a Pepsi Can becoming Archimedes self-swimming
To Europe, I tried to call the shore of Tangier but everything seems to be
The cloudy portrait of desert’s mirage I used to know, someone behind me
Was telling me to hold my breath, that the sea is not here and
No shark is visiting us soon, someone was calling the names of gods
He already buried in the desert’s sand, someone was faulting me, in my thought
We shall continue this fight at the assembly of souls,
In a small river I thought of a wild ocean before I could gather all the
Dialogues the driver returned to where we started our journey
And promised not to take a coward like me thinking of blue ocean
At the face of brown river, asking to become a sea, an ocean, a shore and the salt
He has never witnessed, searching for footage of Mediterranean casualties
At Ẹlẹ́yẹlé Dam, Ibadan, as if the sea has a way of transferring griefs to small rivers.
BIO:
Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo is a Nigerian poet & veterinary medical student whose first love is art making. His poems were nominated for the 2021 BOTN and for the 2021 Pushcart Prize. He is an avid reader who sees poetry in everything and has great interest in storytelling. His works have appeared, or are forthcoming in: Southern Humanities Review, Oxford Review of Books, Scrawl Place, Short Vine Literary Journal, Rigorous, Oakland Arts Review, Tipton Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, South Florida Poetry Journal, Olongo Africa, Roanoke Review, Watershed Review, Panoplyzine, Kissing Dynamite, The Night Heron Barks Review, The Citron Review, Stand Magazine, Louisiana Literature, Obsidian: Literature and Art in the African Diaspora, Welter Journal, Praxis Magazine and elsewhere.
Fasasi twits @FasasiDiipo
That we must not shudder, & your bodies are the canoe, at the middle of a river
I saw a sea, a black girl; a Pepsi Can becoming Archimedes self-swimming
To Europe, I tried to call the shore of Tangier but everything seems to be
The cloudy portrait of desert’s mirage I used to know, someone behind me
Was telling me to hold my breath, that the sea is not here and
No shark is visiting us soon, someone was calling the names of gods
He already buried in the desert’s sand, someone was faulting me, in my thought
We shall continue this fight at the assembly of souls,
In a small river I thought of a wild ocean before I could gather all the
Dialogues the driver returned to where we started our journey
And promised not to take a coward like me thinking of blue ocean
At the face of brown river, asking to become a sea, an ocean, a shore and the salt
He has never witnessed, searching for footage of Mediterranean casualties
At Ẹlẹ́yẹlé Dam, Ibadan, as if the sea has a way of transferring griefs to small rivers.
BIO:
Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo is a Nigerian poet & veterinary medical student whose first love is art making. His poems were nominated for the 2021 BOTN and for the 2021 Pushcart Prize. He is an avid reader who sees poetry in everything and has great interest in storytelling. His works have appeared, or are forthcoming in: Southern Humanities Review, Oxford Review of Books, Scrawl Place, Short Vine Literary Journal, Rigorous, Oakland Arts Review, Tipton Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, South Florida Poetry Journal, Olongo Africa, Roanoke Review, Watershed Review, Panoplyzine, Kissing Dynamite, The Night Heron Barks Review, The Citron Review, Stand Magazine, Louisiana Literature, Obsidian: Literature and Art in the African Diaspora, Welter Journal, Praxis Magazine and elsewhere.
Fasasi twits @FasasiDiipo
