At dawn we burn a song and flame a silence.
At noon the song burns us back. A whoosh grips
the weather, and the sky spills the color of a frown.
Why is the weather stuttering its echo on our skins?
Why are breezes spitting out ballads as warm
as weeping? It starts like this: a metaphor, the mud,
a miracle. Small, long, liquid. And you know this heat
has a memory it tenders midday, in the middle
of our first date, where, on the lawn, you parcel a scar
and ship it into the wind. But it ships itself back
the way weather wants to go: naked, a noise nursed
in your ears, a sadness that buys us sour. We lie lost
in a coven of crows. I bird the wind and feather
a breath and wing all of our doubts away. I plant this war
-mth on your body and tide the story of your lips.
Why grief? Why is love the only death that sculpts itself
alive? Why is your touch the slant of weather awry?
I could go on burning in your arms until I ash into me
-lody. I could shrink a dream in this heat and fatten
a crown of longing. But you are here, tilted like a milder sum
-mer, a better human, loving all my unloved miracles.
A kinder violence, your hair, a shrub on its throne,
shoving down all doubts, down behind a glance you hurl
like a yell, which your eyes tell in tales as hesitant
as tides, which means all we have is all we don’t. Here,
wrapped in sweet, sour fieriness, a dance we call
weather, but wilder, like your voice, like forgiveness
on your palms, like how dusk marshals the rusted dawn,
dun on its body, the flip of all our doubts, shriveled
softly into the hard, hot, hissing dark.
At noon the song burns us back. A whoosh grips
the weather, and the sky spills the color of a frown.
Why is the weather stuttering its echo on our skins?
Why are breezes spitting out ballads as warm
as weeping? It starts like this: a metaphor, the mud,
a miracle. Small, long, liquid. And you know this heat
has a memory it tenders midday, in the middle
of our first date, where, on the lawn, you parcel a scar
and ship it into the wind. But it ships itself back
the way weather wants to go: naked, a noise nursed
in your ears, a sadness that buys us sour. We lie lost
in a coven of crows. I bird the wind and feather
a breath and wing all of our doubts away. I plant this war
-mth on your body and tide the story of your lips.
Why grief? Why is love the only death that sculpts itself
alive? Why is your touch the slant of weather awry?
I could go on burning in your arms until I ash into me
-lody. I could shrink a dream in this heat and fatten
a crown of longing. But you are here, tilted like a milder sum
-mer, a better human, loving all my unloved miracles.
A kinder violence, your hair, a shrub on its throne,
shoving down all doubts, down behind a glance you hurl
like a yell, which your eyes tell in tales as hesitant
as tides, which means all we have is all we don’t. Here,
wrapped in sweet, sour fieriness, a dance we call
weather, but wilder, like your voice, like forgiveness
on your palms, like how dusk marshals the rusted dawn,
dun on its body, the flip of all our doubts, shriveled
softly into the hard, hot, hissing dark.
Samuel Ugbechie has works published or forthcoming in Ruminate Magazine, Palette Poetry, Aurora Poetry, Nottingham Review. He recently won the 2020 Aurora Poetry Winter Contest, and his works have been recognized in awards like the Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, Frederick Holland Poetry Collection Award, Into the Void Poetry Prize, and others. He tweets @sugbechie.