Sunday Poem

Earth-toned and limbless like a puff adder snake.
Dense, like an elephant’s heart.

Horses are known to sleep
while standing up, as if their whole life

is a probable war. Pick up the cider gum, the gac,
shoo the iguana towards the gunk.

God is humorous so he built himself
the sea, filled the ocean with lanternfish

and cod. Frat of the fauna. Even a sperm
whale is less a name and more a misconception

of truth. The wax on its head once
mistaken by sailors for sperm. There is,

despite our outstretched hand,
a design beyond what the hands can reach.

An impossible craft; precise as clockwork.
I am watching now a documentary

demystifying the private life of ants,
their round, chitinous face; their thread-thin arms.

The camera drones around what I assume
is an empire wrecked. This is honest work:

the lifting up of twigs, the carrying,
each ant marching forward despite the heaviness

of wood. One thing is certain: The gift of sight
is a doorway, and knowledge

is the conscious animal’s inescapable loop.
One must crave, above all else, the clarity of ants.

Or crawl, by oneself, against the slant gradient
that is ache. Nothing about joy is happenstance.

Year after year, grains of sand are transformed
to pearls inside the oyster’s calcareous shell.

An eaglet, mid-fall, realizes it can finally ride
upon the wing of clouds. To know,

therefore, is not enough—I must undress myself
in the storm, blow into my wound until it returns

to me singing         like a flute. Pure harmonica,
lucent tenor, limbed animal

airborne. In the documentary, a dying ant chews off
its own injured leg, barely stopping, as if to show me

how little I know, how strong I am, how much pain
I can endure in this my sad perilous life.

By Chiwenite Onyekwelu  

From Palette Poetry