Night Walk With a Snail
written by: Mubarak Said
the last thing we do after reminiscing about the apocalypse;
we gather skeletons, tendons and all the wicked things.
boys are birds. birds are wind. and we take our beliefs to the sepulcher.
we leave our homes and hike to the red sea;
we swim. we drown and the sun swims on our faces.
we continue learning to swim in the eyes of our ancestors.
we hit the road back home and there’s a haven in the wilderness.
aches stacked our limbs. we barf our despair on top of the road,
we continue to mouth our songs; there is home on every horizon.
we sing about apartheid, we use a broken piece of sweat gland
we mould the metaphor of our accent
we split into dissimilar forms: round, slender & wrinkled
we dilute our poetry, we pulsate our hearts [a bomb blast].
we write a poem about where we hide to saturate our days,
and we reflect on the reason for picking imagery over a morsel of food.
we choose a metaphor — a route to our home that is unfurled with enigma
we tell our stories, our mouths holding the brick of a country —
our tales persist to follow a butterfly that explodes beneath our nails
we define the eye of a school teacher when he eats his meal inside a blackboard
we sketch our home, we dream it, we build it, and we sleep on the threshold.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
I use poetry to record my life experiences and to soothe myself from the pain I’ve gone through. In this poem, I travelled to my memories of the long rocky journey I did before and how the end became different from the beginning.
- Night Walk With a Snail - August 18, 2023
