If you like poems, you’ll like Romeo Oriogun, a voracious poet whose pen is singing from paper to hearts. He is the author of Nomad that won an NLNG prize ( $100000 )
Romeo Oriogun is the author of The Gathering of Bastards (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) and Sacrament of Bodies (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). An alumnus of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lives in Ames, Iowa, where he is a postdoctoral research associate at Iowa State University.
He wrote this.
Exile
There’s a place I was given,
A horse with its broken legs.
Lord, I tend to this brief thing called life like a man
Caring for a beast that eats what it loves.
I can’t help this loneliness of people walking away from my eyes,
It is how a city knows its walls are fallen.
The plane breaks through the clouds & San Juan comes into view,
This city shall survive this water, I say.
Once I knew where my circle was in the world,
I could walk into forests with just a book & find my way
Back to my mother’s chest.
I should tell you my mother’s chest was a tree, beside it a flower
Blossomed & was called grace,
I should tell you I once saw the river drowned a bone
& sung it to sleep, maybe this is death,
Maybe this is a mother’s body welcoming a son.
The driver says welcome & I know he means stranger,
I know he means what drives you into the world.
I have come here to find what I’d lost but it will spit me out,
A seed floating on water, a boat, a life
Without the luck of trees.
The city stretches into a fort, as if it is still ready for war,
As if a battle ship sits eternally before her eyes.
I have known this fear, it is called reaching into the future for the cut,
Meaning I still see the men who called me homo, meaning dirt,
Meaning sin, meaning their hands shall divide my body into a barren field.
I once woke up to the beast in my chest cage,
I held it tenderly before severing its neck.
My therapist called it a sacrifice, meaning I saw the blood even in the dark,
I smelt it & knew home drowned last night.
Father, here is what I was given, a goat, the beauty to walk back to the knife,
The man saying grace as if blood isn’t pure enough
& this city. Here at night, I will walk into anything that call me home
& it will hold me for a while. I’ve seen my mother’s bed this way,
The burgundy color of the bedsheets, the walls with old photographs,
Her skin. Here my mother is alive, she’s my city
& I hold her close. Mother, stay with me for a while,
Stay before the sea comes to wash us clean of our thirst.
Romeo Oriogun is the author of The Origin of Butterflies, selected by Kwame Dawes for the APBF New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Series. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Connotation Press, and others. He was the 2017 winner of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, a fellow of the Ebedi International Writers Residency and currently a Du Bois Fellow and an IIE-APF Fellow at Harvard University.
