"The Last Gate to an Old Life" by Romeo Oriogun from ONE

The Last Gate to an Old Life
for Lucy

In the last year of the old drought,
I arrived at the house made of mud bricks
and the darkness of faith. The door
was ajar. On the walls were photographs
of events, relics, maps of our claim
to belonging. The rooms were filled
with the echo of your voice, with the songs
of rituals; the incantation of a thousand lives.
All along, in a country where evenings settle
into the epiphany of a dark and distant sky,
where cows walked over the graves
of old souls, I had lived in small rooms
with the memories of every harvest
while writing into sunset the sonnet
that follows every bird flying
from one continent to the edge of another.
I remembered the chant of your long life,
but not your face — the lines on it,
the borders that appeared and disappeared.
For perhaps, this is the greatest sorrow of all,
I had arrived at the gates of death, the playground
of my childhood, and didn't remember the beginning
of my own life. All that was left of remembrance
was an old house, a graveyard filled with bones
heavy with language, filled with the elegy
of the silenced and the prayers of those faithful
to reincarnation as they are to the decay of flesh,
and all around me were the shadows of old trees,
witnesses to hope and despair.

Copyright © 2025 Romeo Oriogun All rights reserved
from One
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission

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