Self-Portrait with Oceanus
- Dec 9, 2022
- 2 min read
by Chinedu Gospel
This water has fathered my sorrow. For that, I have mastered every skill
involved in the science of floatation. I am learning to unweight myself.
Oceanus, teach me to remember how to forget. How to trample on water
& swim in sand dunes. Because this is the first law of survival. Maybe we
cannot own what the world gives to us. & some may say it’s God’s role in
ecology. But, I contest. Because, the last time God cast his hand into the
earth to take, he left an ark & a sprinkle of love in the flood.
So often, I look in the mirror & say, in my clamoring — the world has left
nothing for me. But, my inverted image inversely repeats, the world has nothing
left for me. So often, too, I nestle on my mother’s eyelashes for warmth. There,
where I first knew that the eye could mean the only possible outlet for the
steam that burns inside the body. It could mean an estuary where grief kisses
light rays. It could mean a wide blue ocean that spreads into another &
many others. This water has mothered my flesh into an iceberg. Less prone
to harm. Less prone to the fear of a tsunami. I am every language a brittle
thing cannot speak. This water in which I’ve drowned my dead & half their
memories, I collect it inside a jug, warm it by the fire of the furnace
in which I burn my body on cold nights. & when the sun rises,
I drink it & am filled with morning.
Chinedu Gospel (Frontier IV) is an emerging poet & undergraduate from Anambra, Nigeria. He plays chess & tweets @gonspoetry. He is a best of the net nominee. He is the winner of the StarLit Award, AsterLit 2021 winter issue. He won an honorable mention in the 2021 Kreative Diadem annual contest (poetry category) & Dan Veach Prize for younger poets, 2022. He was longlisted for the 2022 Unserious collective fellowship. His works of poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Bath Magg, Fiyah Magazine, Sonder Magazine, Roughcut Press, Consequence Forum, Agbowo Magazine, The Deadlands, Blue Marble Review, among many others.
