Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí

Featured Poet

psalm in praise of wanting

& what isn’t propelled by hunger,
the mouth of the beast unhinged inside us
like a broken door, always wanting & wanting?
 
Lord, fill me up with goodness,
I ask for nothing that you cannot do—
 
a lover in whose hands I can melt
& not waste, a pair of beautiful eyes,
green, green pools I can fall in & not drown,
& money, money to make magic of my time.
 
Lord, make of my life a gorgeous song.
 
& if that be too much to ask for,
like a skillful burglar, carefully empty this house.
 
lay each of my bloodied bones in the belly
of a raven, so that each, by magic or mercy, will bloom
into a city of wings.
 

amen

in the eyes of my father, I watch a thousand bright birds,
gentle bodies filled with fire, I watch them all drop—
sick starlings.
 
I am learning: nothing ruins a man
more than the dirty receipts of all that he tried to be
but failed at, a life imagined but never birthed.
 
do we all not carry dreams of a better life, a finer
tomorrow—uncluttered, neat like a well-trimmed afro?
 
you’re so young, my father says, in your head you lay dreams
on dreams like a wonderful lyricist—may you never know
the wretched beast that fills a man up, that wrong spirit, he prays,
 
& this wild phobia spreads over my chest like a fat spill of longing.
 
I fear that the rain will fall & the sun will rise & the moon
& the stars will take the stage of the night & my life won’t
change. like you, I do not want to be a catalog of impossibles:
 
a room heavy with the smell of plucked bones, all rusty,
each a bad flute, littering the floor like wingless prayers.
 
if all that I carry is eaten by time, what will my life mean? I ask.
 
my father peels my palm open & plants a wound in the field
of it. he says, may your life be wild & wonderful.
 
 

lamentation

if you break me open, you will find holes,
raw as fresh wound, holes you carved every time the animal
of your hunger has plucked out the light from a bright thing inside me—
 
what have your wild hands not taken, Lord?
 
the tiny gift, a polished sea shell,
that my mother pressed into my palm,
the wooly animal of my innocence,
the magnificent mouth in my story—
 
What?
 
o Lord of subtractions, of fruits
falling from trees even before they wear ripeness—
 
look at me with eyes soft as a baby’s babble.
 
& if your eyes be cruel animals, violent as
the wind that shakes the branches & rustles the curtains—
 
do not look here.
 
 

ode to grief

animal that wrecks a mother’s sleep,
ugly pill that sits on the tongue long after the swallowing.
 
how raw your touch.
how bright the wound you become in the body.
 
I have brought you salt,
still the weather in my body is tasteless,
I have brought kola,
yet the egret of my longing does not perch,
& my fingers, they are sour from the libations
I have poured—
 
orisha ta o le ba binu,
what ritual do you require?