Raphael Edookue

Nothing Slits Here

I am along a tarred road.
Everywhere is quiet
This road isn't in a buzzing city
It links two local districts.
A snake is crawling
attempting to cross this road
into an opposite green grass field
that sits to welcome one into a forest.

I'd vowed to return to my creator 
without a blood-stained palm
so I'll not raise my hand to 
kill this black snake that can 
make a good meat in this hunger-stricken place.
It looks pregnant but it has dared 
the slitting teeth of a tarred road 
and has crossed into the green grass field
I've crossed the road too
into the forest walking 
through the green grass field.

A beautiful forest
a graveyard for the
bodies of men of mysterious deaths
myth says death hovers here
in a hot afternoon like this
but I am here 
parrots are too
we're daring the
hovering death.

It is evening.
I am going home
with a message
zipped up in the
pockets of my mind
to those fearful folks there.

I will tell them that:
snakes crawl on tarred roads
daring their slitting teeth
parrots whisper in the cemetery
of men of mysterious deaths
daring hovering death
but nothing slits here
nothing hovers here
yet mouths are closed
like clotted wounds.

Raphael Edookue is a playwright and poet based in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where among other things, he serves as the Publicity Secretary of Association of Nigerian Authors, Rivers State branch. A 2021 poetry finalist of African Writers Awards, Raphael's poems have been published in The Mariner and ANA Review respectively. His published works are My Father's Farmland and Against Her Right (plays) respectively.