ISSUE 1

A QUNUT OF HEAVENSONGS

Tell me about the regrets where the things that once aroused us bury us / tell me about old songs that hearse grief into memories / tell me about the past that has strangered us from home / where dust chases dusk / & corpse buries corpse / amen & men vault on expiring hours / forgetting that a sandglass could get fractured or filled out / tell me how everything ends on a quivering lips of an orphan who has swallowed enough dreams / who has walled in dreams to a pillar of quaking

dust / see as he almost becomes a dead nothing / before he harkens to adhan / & wears meanings into his greying smile / see as he palms his crumbled bones towards the end / on his lips a Qunut of heaven songs / everything dead awakes like the rose of Jericho / everything shallow turns shallom / & the trapped boy becomes a bird on the ledge / his fall becomes a flight of freedom.

Babatunde Waliyullah Adesokan (Toonday) writes from Oyo State, Nigeria. He works with Firstbank. He is a lover of poetry; a lover of everything that breathes poetry. His works appeared / forthcoming in Pangolin Review, Wales Haiku, Ethel-Zine, Shallowtales Review, Stillwater Review, RoadRunnerReview, Lucent Dreaming etc. Upi can find him on Twitter @tunde_adesokan, on Instagram @toondayatkins and on Facebook as tunde.w.adesokan

"A Qunut of Heavensongs" was previously published in Issue 40 of Kissing Dynamite.