The Quest For Golden Things Is A Quest For Scars…

I dreamed I rode on horseback through
a smaller version of the world
seeking some treasure that my clan had lost.
 
Upon my return the clan-house was fallen.
Grey rivers ran down
the matriarch’s wrinkled cheeks
 
—as the desert rock
must give the healing fluid, touched by
the stammerer’s writhing rod—
 
O she had seen, from the rubble’s porch,
the pigmy panting, scratching the sand
of the abandoned shore.
 
I’ve heard of words becoming flesh, to nag
a world devoid of ears, but had never tried
to give belief to it…
 
She raised her hands, fingers like a garden fork
thin and incomplete. She said the words
that wrap my tail-bone now, even as I wake.
 
 
 

Teniola Tonade holds a B.A in Philosophy from the University of Lagos, Nigeria, and will soon resume as a Graduate Assistant at the same university. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Word Riot, the ‘New African Poetry’ section of Elsewhere lit mag, and More Than a Number: Poems and Prose for Baga, an anthology that addresses the menace of terrorism (particularly Boko Haram) in Nigeria. He is the co-founder and managing editor of the multi-purpose website Afrikana.ng.