MAY POEM: Transience

Transience

The moon of many years has not aged

Like it was in Oluyole so it is in Ebedi

Covers of clouds sleep around like exiles

To become the dreams of fingers whipping

Hopes on keys, opening doors to desires

Which make windows entrances and exits.

When morning arranges itself at dawn

The dew is a curtain of questions

But once it parts itself to unveil hills

Blanketed by browning leaves

Assuring tomorrow is re-signed.

Each dream, returns naked once fulfilled

And again patterns figured as advances

Become the meaning of restless nights

And mornings that forget evenings.

Singing birds are a cliché of bushes

So what is it with the game of hope,

I see in the traveller’s eyes:

Finding solitude in a hideaway?

January is the metaphor of firsts

Its entrée of prediction is a varnish

Harbouring small sobs and silences

Like evening is the middleman

Between the morning and night

With one dream birthed in full course

As day reinvents itself with strayer dew.

*This poem was written during my stay as an artist-in-resident at the Ebedi International Writer’s Residency, where I worked on a collection of interconnected short stories. 
(c) Jumoke Verissimo