Tuesday Poem by Dami Àjàyí
The living have stepped out of the threshold, stepped into the shoes of those who don’t change clothes, those who don’t bathe, those who don’t fart or burp, those who don’t cough or lose weight, those who don’t carry wounds, flies and shame alongside their family name.
The living can draw a last breath to join the dead. The dead don’t preen over social convention like cavernous nostrils as anterooms for drainflies. The dead don’t bother the living about healthy living. The dead don’t say; the dead are to those we pray. & pour libations. They are better than us, ancestors, whose crooked paths on earth we may have measured with our cynicism.
They are better than us now. The ones who have crossed the threshold to join the gods to become gods. This afternoon, you walked out of a journey & took to another journey. Goodnight, Uncle Babalola. Yours was an unknowable path. Yours was with iconoclastic tact. Yours was a life measured out with your own teaspoon, on your own terms.
