3 Poems – Precious Chidera Harrison

A wilting winter flower, a monochromatic image of enfolding petals pale yellow tones. (c) Robert Frede Kenter (2025)

GRIEF IS LIKE POOR NETWORK RECEPTION

Grief is love evening into ashes.
Grief is loving in the past tense.
My mother died and my heart grew teeth.
Every night I sat in the moonlight,
my heart chewing into the emptiness of silhouettes.

I shouted my mother’s name into the wind
and in that moment she was alive.
She blossomed in my mouth,
wet as breath, round as sound
blooming on the tip of my tongue.
The light of love like a small hope
breaking the inertia that sets a heart ablaze.
Coals charred down to coldness,
to a heap of cinders whirling in the wind.
Her memories, red cinders whirling inside my head.
Tears like a stream welled in my eyes.
How grief whets the heart with its cold touch
until the eyes blushes into cloudbursts.

Grief is like poor network reception.
Every day you go to the telephone booth
to dial a number and call a brother,
a sister, to speak to that friend, to your lover,
but the gabble crooning from the other end:
“. . . not reachable . . . not reachable . . .”
redresses your hopes into despair.

I do not know what it looks like
but I know that death is a kleptomaniac.

ELEGY

the flowers are wilting. it is morning.
the bullet holes on the wall say
that home can no longer keep us within.
outside, there is violence
thirsting for our tenderness.
the night leaking our bones clean of light.
say grief.
             say wilt.
                          say morning.
                                             say mourning.
                          tell me the moon is
bleeding again. & the wind
is leaking from bodies littered
like garbage on the streets.
come take a photograph of this,
of bodies lying lifeless on the road.
make me believe there is an end
to this violence. teach me again
to pronounce peace without being
reminded it is the antonym of war.
because even the phrase at peace
begs a different meaning. the flowers
are wilting. it is still morning.
men are grieving. women are mourning.
the bullet holes on the walls say
home can no longer keep us within.

AUBADE WITH SUNFLOWERS

This afternoon, I stepped out of my room
but my loneliness didn’t crawl out with me.
So then I realized that my loneliness
is a tiny animal afraid of the touch of sunlight.
I look up and my gaze meets the sun.
How he pours out a smile like a jug of wine.
The sky bursting, raining a flurry daffodils.

I lift my heart up like a cup to his yellow lips.
I dance. I dance in this downpour of joy.
At this moment, my shadow is hardly mine.
I dance and dance. And dance off my shadow.

I have grown intimate with loneliness.
How he holds my hands in the darkest hours,
how he fills my glass with the wine of solitude.
I fall sober in his arms like a little kid.
How he stuffs my mouth full of my anxieties.
How he places his hands on my shoulders
until all of my burdens morph into arias.

Outside here this afternoon, in the yellow glare
of the sun, it is impossible to feel lonely.
Beside the street the blades of grass are waving,
birds singing; there, the trees calling me by my name.

Precious Chidera Harrison is a poet and artist born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. He won the maiden edition of the Pawners Paper Contest (Poetry Category). He was shortlisted for the 2024 Unserious Collective Fellowship and for the 2024 edition of the Chukwuemeka Akachi Prize for Literature. He was longlisted for the 2024 Blessing Kolajo Poetry Prize and was also an honorable mention in the inaugural Rhonda Gail Williford Prize, 2023. He is a 2024 SprinNG fellow, and a member of the Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation. His works have been appeared or are forthcoming in online and print journals like The Bitchin Kitsch, Afrocritik, Anthropocene Poetry, Haunted Words, The Muse Journal, Eunoia Review, Bleating Thing Magazine, Brittle Paper, FERAL Journal, IHRAM Publishes, Swim Press, and SprinNG. Twitter: @ChideraHarry

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