Where Every Stranger is my Father

By Ewa Gerald Onyebuchi

 

O bird of night. You have found me digging into the soil

Of time for my lover’s voice, the way my mother searches

 

                                                                                                                The void for my father's face, his scent leaving the
                                                                                                                                  Room before her nose finds him

Like my lover, fleeing the rooms in my eyes

Where I keep all my dead alive.
 

                                                                                                                                             My mother stands before the mirror

                                                                     Massaging her bloated belly, smiling as she eases into my father’s arms

He spins her around gently

Bends to speak to her belly,

 

                                                                                                 Be a strong boy for me and your mother, while I am away,
                                                                                                                My father says planting a kiss on her navel.
But he never came home,
Even though the war had ended.

 

                                                                My feeble heart wasn’t built to understand the language of war, of erasure
                                                                                                         And I carried my mother’s wails across the sea
 

Into countries, where every stranger is my father.
Once, a man I had met in Munich, suggested I see a therapist
 

                                                             Don’t wait till the darkness drowns you, he said, slipping away from the bed,

                                                               Into his shorts. But I could not stop thinking how he could be my father
 

How each lover could be holes drilled into walls

Waiting to be filled with portraits of a father and his son.
 

                                                                                              How my mother cried on days when I returned from school

                                           Her hands clenching the bleached photograph of the stranger that was my father.
 

O bird of night. Teach my hands to hold the harp without shuddering

I want to carry my dead as songs, soaking the city in light.