I could look back, and write precisely
what happened; brag about how I precisely write about
what happened in a house of loosening rafters,
the rafters of things loosing and drifting apart;
apart into tribal anarchy.
I could never mistake about the date and time.
I could serve it like a beef stew,
stew and potato at dinner,
the dinner you call your friends to eat.
But I write of what geysers up in my soul.
Not of salted ashes of hate
and of earth dying, I write of this butterfly
that leaps off this flower and staggers
away on the air not like a bird flying .
Oritsegbemi Emmanuel Jakpa lives in Ireland. His poetry has been published in a number of online and print journals including the African American Review, and an Irish-Canadian anthology. He is a Yeats' Pierce Loughran Scholar.
