The Requiem of a Hobo
written by: Salim Yakubu Akko
my body was eaten, like a fruitless plant by the wind.
mother sat with her perched mouth
supplicating for a safe home.
but it’s never the same; the road was painted grey.
I looked into the eyes of the rumbling sky
then a voice came, broke the door & chewed the cayuse. then my legs hovered, like a cursed lame.
I’d no burrow—a place I could call home. and the winter wind gave me a blanket of cold, and there, I read the threnody of a bum. and I wrote a requiem—how I slept in the cold; how I died and resurrected in the winding wind. I wrote in silence, “if I’d have known, I wouldn’t have stepped out from mother home.” I missed the soft palms of grandmother. I missed the poems of my bed. I missed home.
Salim Yakubu Akko is a writer and poet. He is a World Voices Magazine’s Nigerian correspondent and a guest contributor at Applied Worldwide. He has his works published/forthcoming in Upwrite Magazine Nigeria, Scratch Poetry Magazine, Calabar Poetry Magazine and Trouvaille Review.
Latest posts by Salim Yakubu Akko (see all)
- The Requiem Of A Hobo - January 28, 2022
