Grateful

grateful
to Agbekẹ

in every situation, be grateful, says my grandmother
whose hands nurse life as tenderly as her silver-tipped hair.
even at your worst—when you pierce through the elytron
of history, like historian cannibalizing pieces of the past
in a fragmentary form, stay grateful. even when birds,
those heralds of beauty—blow over into the conceit of sea,
as if their serfs could ever bow to the silence of their absence.
yesterday evening, i sifted through the sepia-toned of my father’s
photo album, a child walking through the playground of wonder
& realized arithmetic sometimes fails miserably in counting the stars
swallowed by the abyss. with the first flip of the album,
fireflies posed in their secret smiles just beyond the leaflet of dusk,
as if the morning’s caress might blister the petals soft glow.
the second flip, heavy with faces adorned in the memento of old
British finery, their hair—tribute to the grace of black.
trousers—oversized, as if networking the stories of three nights
before my generation. the next flip, about water & a sailor
somebody asks, can you swim the water to the very end? he says:
all my life, i’ve been swimming but there seems to be no end
to my swimming out of grief. talking about my grandfather, fearless,
yet knowing the gun’s hollow whisper, the bullets sing like old ghosts
looping in the net of his survival. then the last flip, an old picture
of grandma that reminds me of the guest snatching the breath
of prayer from her heartbeat that night. so little was i to understand
the old woman’s farewell, “goodbye son, goodbye” & i couldn’t do more
than weep like science that shaped her odd
& name her late. i rushed to her grave “a vessel for the unending
dialogue we’d started ages ago. “Grandma”” I called into the silence,
“in losing you, have i lost all my wings, should i still be grateful?”.