Shaping Grief – A Prose Poem by Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale

Shaping Grief

if you shape your grief enough, it could fit perfectly on your body with no part sagging a dead memory & you will have to sit with the night on a piano to find a song exact shape of your loss. there’s something always present when a cathedral pauses for a minute silence & it’s like a bird emptied of music, like hollowness, like a dream dissolved in the wind, like a photograph, like a room held under the skin of silence. listen, when we come together to return a body to dust- with tears & flowers & hymns, there’s always fire in our throat, a longing to burn & belittle death in a dirge. there’s always a stretched road with the wailing of trees in our mouth as a way back into dead memories to what could have been. there’s always a story, deep & broken in our eyes & you could see the cavity in our tears where the deceased is missing. you could pinpoint the exact moment the dead leave their memories in the lungs of the living. inside your body, echoes are chaos that navigate to the saneness of cemeteries & that’s to say, once, a voice stuttered & melted in your marrows. once, a sad news broke & a piece of your mother exited her sick bed for your loins. once, you said the word loss & it leaves a leaking on your tongue. once, you walked with rainbows to a tomb seizing everything that sets you free at dawn. inside your body, a boy folds into a chrysanthemum before making home out of solitude, before calling a lunar eclipse burial of the moon. & you are like him when the world slumps into an endless abyss of silence with no hand to disrupt your body from clinking glass with sorrow. you are like him on days the mouth of a graveyard is the only mouth to echo the sound of your thought. learn, if you shape your grief enough, it could fit perfectly on your body with no part sagging a dead memory & you’ll have to sit with the night on a piano to find a song exact shape of your loss.

Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale is a Nigerian Poet & Writer, an explorer of grief, silence, beauty, loss & everything artful that meets the eye. A Best of the net Nominee, Best Student Poet- Federal University Lafia 2017, winner of Luma ART Poetry contest 2018, first runner up- Poets in Nigeria (PIN) poetically written prose contest 2020 among others. His works have appeared and forthcoming on Split Lip Magazine, Kalahari Review, Rising Phoenix, Agbowo Magazine, Praxis Magazine, Tuck Magazine, Lunaris Review and elsewhere. Tweets art & poetry: @OlabisiAkinwal1 & intersects the beauty of people, places, poetry & photography on Instagram; @bisiquills.

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