Content Warnings: Depiction of Death or Terminal Illness This boy, half my height, The keloids above his eyes are not scars The earth, that mute witness, My father, pilgrim to stone, This boy, half my size, About the Author Nas Jolaade is a student at the University of Ibadan. His work has appeared/is forthcoming in Bracken Magazine, New Nottingham Magazine, Gork Gazette, Brittle Paper, Poetry Sango-Ota, PoemsForPOI and others. He was a finalist for the 2024 Kofi Awoonor Poetry Prize. He tweets @thejolaade.
mutters
that tombs are gardens where futures wither on the vine.
He says a life is an egg, brittle
as the promise of a dawn that may never break.
but cartography—maps of each moment
death reached for him and grasped only water.
answers in murmurs only the heart deciphers.
Says it has soliloquies of a life unseen,
where tombs are faces of people’s lost prayers,
silent, unmoving, waiting for the sun to answer.
pressed his brow against the Kaaba, prayed for years—
and died between one breath and the next,
a breeze that never touched the sky.
misses that ignorance is the softest bed,
where we sleep without the weight of regret.
That to be unborn is to be a star—
unshackled from the gravity of a name, guilt, suffering,
and free from the cruel arithmetic of time.
