Good Times

I tried to remember the last good times we had,
and only this one, pervaded by fear,
could be called up however I tried.
Both of us on an adventurous tour
of the Osogbo grove, where the tour guide,
a young short man, told us that if we
were silent enough, we would hear the dead speak.
We could only hear the monkeys squeaking.
The air smelled of sulphur, like gunpowder.
To prove the tour guide wrong, we took off our shoes
and walked as gently as we could.
The grove gargled water in her greedy mouth,
and when we didn’t expect it, we heard them ––
we knew because we could not see them.
The land spoke to us in a strange lingo;
we couldn’t believe we could hear the dead
in a familiar vernacular
but a tongue neither of us could speak.
We hid into each other’s bodies
and remained entwined until the fear died,
as if fear wasn’t enough to change our lives.
The tour guide laughed and laughed, mimicking us,
and said, It’s clear you two must be lovers, 
without realising he was referring to the past.

ξ

Okwudili Nebeolisa is a Nigerian writer whose poems have previously appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Threepenny Review, Salamander Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Verity La, and whose nonfiction have appeared in Catapult and Commonwealth Writers. He will be beginning an MFA in creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in January.