‘Gbenga Adeoba is a student at the University Of Ibadan, Nigeria. His poems have appeared/forthcoming in Elsewhere and Juked.--------
War Notes
It is in your loss
that you learn the alphabets of silence.
The survivors of this war
Are mostly memories:
The remains of your father—
Autobiographical manuscripts
Written in extinct languages,
Pre independence newspapers,
And warfront pictures eulogizing Burma.
Everyone who passes is your relative,
And renewed conversations
Are of birdsongs
Interrupting monologues around ancestral graves.
Shortly,
A lone star will lead you home.
Secrets in Water
What rivers retain of the rain
remains a mystery
between the earth, the sky
and God who causes secrets to fall
in torrents too fast for men to decode.
The same secrets fish know,
guaranteeing their survival in freshwaters
soon gather to men on a hook,
and find their way back into salty water
or whatever man decides
to make of them.