Copihue Poetry

I have a hymn, a hymn has me.
—Ernest O. Ògúnyemí

​

I borrow a voice from the fragment of
rain garnered
through the cairns. I suspect the crickets
and fireflies
swaddled in hay know this ghazal like
uncut silence.
I feel I am doomed to play this song
over again;
that it becomes just as trite as my name
sitting on repose.
I am only twenty, but I have lived such brief
moments to
see life through everything that bleeds—
everything crushed
There is nothing to be ashamed of in
being broken;
let the earth permit the briar a twist for
the night. For
I am a traveller who has lost everything
but this braided horn
I feel if I swipe pain through the edges
of my pain(t)brush
I will calcify its evanescence on a canvas

I feel if I look harder
into the bronze water, my reflection would
be a broken hymn
sung solo through the fragrance of light
and everything
that seeps through it. Tommorow, I might
die, and I am afraid
all I will leave behind are a pair of starry eyes—
my nude hanging
on air like jobless memory; mourners sabled
and the song falls from
their mouth like untrimmed grass: hallelujah!
latched in me.