Breach To Bones (TO GABRIEL) — T. C. Nwosu

Breach To Bones
(TO GABRIEL)

It's useless to glimpse
at the dotted disappearance
of a dark stairway…

He came bespectacled, blind to his stick and stachel,
cast in a form that could hold
any worldly-wise ambitions to ransom,
mere feeble hulk in its deathward drift,
vanishing vacuum clothed in barren dirt,
once an accomplished mason whose craft
has lost its smooth edge to doddering darkness…

And I could not help my burning heart
that nearly died at the crossroads
of such tragic imperatives.

At first a sibilant disguise, now a suffering exhaustion,
a case-study in dreadful daring
that managed to leaf through the pages
of life as if it was a book of tears.

He had seen both crowns and crosses
and the laddered walls between them;
He had defeated giants and judges
and worn perfumed ribbons to ceremonies;
He had left circlets of beautiful blossoms
on many a withered neck and nest;
And the once legendary shelterer
is now the frail sheltered;
the acclaimed dancer, the unbeaten dance
the rapping bite, the whispering bark…

Dusk is endurance, dawn the message
muddled through the consequences
of breath and birth, tongue and time.

O flesh, creep not, for the voice
I have heard is warmed
by God's own laughter
which feeds wrinkled hearts
with strength and beauty
and binds the wounds made by cannon eyes.

O face, spotted by heat and dusted by wind
would that I should speak of glimpses and appearances
to herald the dawn and dusk of knowledge!

T. C. Nwosu