By Nurain Ọládèjì
A child’s need to be chased, to hide and be found
time and again, is why my father is the ghost stalking
my dreams. When I was a child, hunting for
where to hide and wait for my friends to seek,
I found, inside an abandoned yard with
an unfinished building, a hole in the ground.
Something I do not know stopped me from jumping,
slowed me to stop at its edge and crane
my neck to watch the hole sink deeper, till I saw
ripples as the pebbles my feet had kicked touched
the water. Later, when my friends found me elsewhere,
I did not make a point of how I could have won this
game by ending it. I was named after a grieving lover
who then married his dead lover’s sister, and on this
basis earned the title of The Bearer of Double Lights.
And when, again, his new lover died, he must have
learnt that some lights are not bound by affection
to enliven man. When my father named me, he could not
have imagined that each of our worlds would be as
committed to resisting a convergence, he could not have
known that, naming me, he was only renaming himself.
Bio
Nurain Ọládèjì is a writer and reluctant resident of Lagos, Nigeria. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Wales, Olongo Africa, Transition, Acumen, and elsewhere.