‘HOW I BECAME A POET’ BY AIRE JOSHUA OMOTAYO

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Through the nights of fading muse
and the tincture of rhythm and blues,
my soul danced on the stage of stammering history
with drums and lyres scribbling my story.

Through the lips of the nightingales,
the gurgling gongs and moonlight tales,
solitude blared its jingles through my windows
as the snores painted my walls with punching blows.

The night’s skin crumbled in tatters of grey
and its body laid in a crucible of silence’s bay,
where rivers burn in ruffled flaming borders
as their waves crackle in fiery waters.

My lips were blunt like the butt of a sabre
as the remnant of unspoken words formed an acre
of lands serenading the terrains of my mouth
with letters traveling from north to south.

My fingers bled on fields of war.
When the scrolls of my heart fell in shreds of gore,
my tongue became a pink fire rising from a tomb
and the flames beaconed on the hills of morrow’s womb.

This is how I became a bard on blank pages.
When the street of my ears wore the feet of the words of sages,
the lines of my poetry filed into a long river, serene,
and stretched into a rope wetting the fields of green.