“What the Dawn Told Me”

By Kunle Okesipe

What the Dawn Told Me

That if you nurse a grain of light enough

it would soon become a sea;

if you stroke the lineament of the earth enough,

it would soon become the body of a woman.

That memory is a token of silence between the barking of dogs,

like a radius of lightning across the sphere of dark circles,

that the barking of dogs is a foretaste of thunderstorms,  

that the twisting of rivers precedes the dance of oceans

and if the ants of these feelings are fed,

they will surely dwarf the legend of the elephant.

Kunle Okesipe currently teaches postcolonial literature at Igbinedion University, Okada, Nigeria. His adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters, “The Rattling of Sagoe’s Drink Lobes” won an Association of Nigerian Authors’ adaptation contest. His poetry has appeared in adda, The Tiger Moth Review, Moonchild Magazine, African Writer Magazine and others.