Osieka Osinimu Alao

Longlisted Poem: “Republic of Rage and Roses”

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Republic of Rage and Roses

An inferno sits on our heads like a crown of flames, 

licensed by the treaty of collective somnambulism. 

A map chiselled out of a voidscape with blood 

never ceases to riffle with clefts of crimson dreams. 

But before the beginning, there was a beginning

 whose language was strangulated by soulless hands; 

now, every tongue is a flourishing fray 

spilling the echoes of incoherence. 

We chased out the seafarers with whip-bearing masquerades, 

to purge our rivers of incongruous chants and chains, 

but you know what they say of rivers that never yield 

to the desires of men; they birth their own clan 

of beings, half-flesh half-fury, and usher them 

into the coliseum, on the water-backs of bondservants. 

Here, the carved image is the iridescence of death, 

borne by the acute applause of overfed sycophants. 

Here, every bloodline is an endangered tapestry 

offering oblation at the bank of anarchy. 

The beautiful thing about living here is that 

we get to witness the many roses of death, 

bearing the alluring scents of putrefaction, 

bearing the rainbow colours of adorned graves. 

Morbidity is home, reclining in the comfort of our laps 

and the cuisine of our lapses, etching itself into our foreheads 

as the motif of the times: there’s nothing left to dread 

for a race who cultivates a rose garden for its dead. 

At this junction of bones, we’re busy pointing fingers 

when we should rather be cutting off all our arms, 

so we are unable to bear guns against one another, 

so we are unable to play god against one another. 

Sometimes, the only way to grow is to be uprooted. 

Sometimes, the only way to see is to be blind. 

From the umbra of earth’s core, we’ve been uprooted 

like vile things banished from the sacred altars of the living. 

Yet, the only things that grow are the fleshy stems 

of the memories of madness, in this horticulture of hell. 

In the beginning, let there be light, but we were born blind, 

only opportune to the sore sight of the spirits of sadness. 

Now, the marketsquare screams in the silhouette 

of silence, the language of every end. 

In this poem, the masquerades have forgotten how to dance, 

how to swirl and swerve till the moon leaps off the night sky 

into the constricting chest of a dying child, so their soul 

can be raptured into an eden of undefiled light. 

In this poem, the rosebud is not an insignia of romance, 

but the tenderness with which breaths are snuffed out 

like candles, slight and slender, burning graciously 

in the foreknowledge of their temporality. 

In the end, everything will die in the Republic, 

except the spirit of its myth and music