I Go to The River to Pray By Chinaza James-Ibe | First Published on Akewi Magazine

Mother, who knows nothing about the shame of nakedness, whose teeth we have refashioned to crown our plaits, whose womb is an unending banquet, whom all the greatest dancers mimic. Mother, whom the heavenly bodies take turns to gaze at, I bring you flowers, so you may fill them with your scent. Prism of memories. I come to you with an unsutured heart, black like the burnt tip of a blade of grass. I do not ask to be made numb; how then can I know my father's father, who died from the sight of death? They say that heartbreak is the history of mankind, and ache is the universe wading through liquid paths of memory. Mother, whose feet are as long as the loincloth of invisibility, whose face is a mirror. The lithe bird who swallowed the rock that was meant to bruise it; the dibịa that gave time a taste of its own potion. Oguguamakwa, I have come to you to seek the face of my mother at the onset of her widowhood, her oiled hair shimmering on concrete: tell her to forgive love. I have come with hibiscuses for my father, a child suckling from bilious breasts: tell him to forgive love. I have come with ixoras for the woman whom love drove to insanity; I have come to seek the body chewed by a truck's tires on his way to his own Ịgba nkwụ: tell him to forgive. I have come with the ripest palm nuts for the motherless child, whose life came at the price of loss: tell her to forgive love. I have come to seek the mad man's corpse, murk-filled, malaised, mouth: tell him to forgive the market. Mother, mirror, I have come to seek the world whose ache I am reliving, whose rage grows in my womb—foetus clamoring for the blood of its mother. Teacher who teaches by mimicking the actions of the student, I promise that I'll never again look at a corpse and see a stranger.