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Two poems by Eniitan Tejuoso

Poetry 
Eniitan Tejuoso
Eniitan Tejuoso is an Interview Editor with Africa Policy Journal. She is a poet, writer, and multimedia creative. She spent the first half of her life in Abuja, Nigeria before heading to the United States to further her education, and her passion for using creative inquiry as a cornerstone for societal change and vision-building has led her to pursue interdisciplinary degrees at both Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Medical School. Her professional experience ranges from community engagement to health policy, and she is interested in doing work at the intersection of health, media, and business. As a Media, Medicine, and Health master’s student, her research is focused on maternal health and child development within the context of Nigeria and Nigerian identity.

(I) What a good mourning it will be

You tried hooking the Sun to horizon

Because you fear her flare when she’s at her peak

Blinded once by her brilliance

Your aim is to keep her softened, half-risen

Set at a level where you need not lift your chin

Where you need not rise to chase after her

Your brazened sprint East is frenzied and fraught

Believing you can capture that which can never be caught

Until you are blinded by the mirage that is your own thought

On your run to seize her light, those hurried feet will twist

Your fall to death as promised as the rise and shine of the Sun

And when she peers over the horizon tomorrow

What a good mourning it will be

(II) 21,915 Days Later

Do you see me? Across the water,

I see you reaching the sun

and basking in its light.

Over here, it only knows

to throw down flames and

make tears come down scorching,

but it seems that where you are

sight dims the brighter you shine.

Do you remember when we shared a womb?

When we swam in the same waters,

grew together in our motherland,

and ate out of the palms

of our father’s hands?

You once said that in your reflection

you see me, and I wonder if

where you are now,

waters are ever still enough

for you to see yourself.

Listen.

I am drumming against the shoreline.

Seashells have become fingernails and

fingernails seashells.

The skin on my hands have been replaced

by sand, and as I beat against these crumbling

grounds, I pray.

I pray that the ocean waves

carry the rhythm of my sorrow well enough

to find its way to you, but

the Atlantic is known to swallow

stories whole and spit them back out

drenched with everything but

the truth.