Poetry

flickr photo

By

Babatunde Babafemi Babawale

Man is a flower (sea man)

The life we had was inside the flowers

on dead men’s tombs;

You never know which tales you will become

on living lips tomorrow.

We were five boys rowing a wrecked rubber boat,

Our hinges leaping to the moon like a toad,

We were the dead boys inside

Every warning you were told

The soldier said,

‘Your feet were too cold to walk into freedom’

So every morning,

men sailed east to price our bodies into slavery,

The memories of our lost misery

lived inside the glory

we never fulfilled.

Few tongues will tell tales about

those boys that were captured

inside the web of greener pastures

For

No leaves no medicine

our bodies become too cold to row

one by one boys become ghosts,

& we drenched the ocean with our tears

The soldier said,

“Let fish feed with the flesh of a man

& we will call them mermaids”

So dead boys were tossed inside the sea

& their flesh was torn

inside tales

& we become flowers on a tomb

without a body

& we die without a tomb.

Running

This beautiful rum

was where my soul departs

inside the fingers that weave me

into a man.

If anything of a man

remains inside this body

I assure you,

It’s an empty bottle of broken cork.

For every sip

I break into laughs about my past:

My Father wanted me a sailor; but I was a woolly sheep,

I feared sea water and ships,

So I ran away from home,

unto the street that bore

the insignia

“Luke 15:11-32”

There I was lost,

Finding myself

Inside each coin tossed

at my feet.

What do I do with my breath

That has become filth?

Every cold night my heart become stiff,

Till I became a body without a man.

Don’t let my father find me

He died the day he longed to see me,

His headstone needs my flower

I will be going with a cactus,

& he will know I’ve grown to love water,

A beautiful rum.

Babatunde Babafemi Babawale

Babatunde Babafemi Babawale is a 25 years old Nigeria Born Poet. He lives and writes from his father’s house and his ambition is to study poetry at Warren Wilson College.