A poem: The Exile’s Lover

It is the night we beg for dawn to break that

we live the realities of hell the most—all becomes false.

And as this garden of hell burns truth into cinders,

so much to rehearse sombreness in us,

while we eat berries of lust as loins bite at dusk, wishing

the morning is a new testament.

Today, I watch the future sneak

out from borders of dusk’s aperture,

trusting nature to solve the riddles of lightning

into crashing shimmers across the skies.

It is raining paints, but the soils of the son—vendors of this land

can only paint as much as nature’s colours allow,

he sketches out things imagined from deprived realities,

long before the warmth of a land’s embrace will come.

Today, I am the lover: a sea of strayed riddles

settled in shuttling latitudes of liquid and sleepless nights.

I wonder if this is that middle season, that time of ends,

when I should betroth hope as an even better partner.

                               

So like the riddle of the soil in the veins of leaves;

culinarily delivered as vegetable into willing mouths,                                                                                 

the riddle of the berry is solved on this lover’s eyelids.

Waiting for the night to call the day to function,

it is with blinking wet lashes I stake claim to land,

I’ve found rainbows are in human tears; the sun is in the soul.

(c) Jumoke Verissimo 2012