Longlisted Poem: “Something About Flowers”
GERALD ONYEBUCHI EWA is a writer from Ebonyi State. He is a graduate of microbiology from the University of Ibadan, and was a finalist in the Gerald Kraak Awards as well as the 2025 Dream Foundry Contest for Emerging Speculative Fiction Writers.
Something About Flowers
I walk Ray everyday to the park,
sit and watch the sunset and the children scampering around with kites
But today, I sip the silence like a cup of coffee
Ray whines and lolls its tongue and stares ahead.
Across from me, is a tall, faded beach house—now a colonial relic
behind those walls once stood an exchange house for black flesh,
huge chains married to hands and feet. A man
runs to the sea to escape his captors, and returns as a body full of water,
full of stories dwelling in sands—a name flushed out of history’s loins.
Is it mercy when the flames kiss the sores off your back?
But what about the choir of scars singing for justice?
What’s the cure to this language of erasure?
Perhaps man’s greatest malady has been the gap
in his knowledge, the need to experiment with
every flower by the roadside,
to undress petals of time from every cracked mirror.
The flowers are singing about the dying sun,
about the holes in a dress
What’s this madness of invention,
of grenades eating the flesh of a city and licking clean its bones?
Everyday I sit by my window and watch the world dance to the music of its madness
forgive me, I am also guilty of silence.
Who cares about roses and tulips when the stomach is a church without roof?
Rivers in Soku and Oyokotoro once reflected God’s smiling face—
how quickly he turns his back against their tears, their mouths stuffed
with the ashes of their children.
Tell me, what song do birds sing when they drown?
Where do flowers go when they lose their home? Tell me.