Elegy: The Unsung

Prosper Ìféányí

After taking a shit in the ass-scalding latrine pit,

my brother and I would scamper through the

alley-mouth into a squat and oblong structure

that could pass for home. Tonight, the lanterns

have a sickly yellow glow. Only yesterday, the room

blazed like a lighthouse through the half-completed

walls. I can still hear father’s smoke-scarred voice

lichening the tenement as mother runs across the

melting tarred road. Her lips quiver like bare buttocks

under the harmattan. Tongue lolling as she recoils to

the viselike grip of the whip-toting monster. We hung

our faces on the windowsill—my brother and I—as we

watched. A boy selling a chunk of ice would stand

by the ogre, his heavy lidded eyes affixed on the

action until he is caught in the wildfire. Watch him.

Watch as his ice bursts into effulgent silver crystals

before hitting the dead earth. And as if shrunk into

a brook, the beast would recline into the night—

underwaterscape. Bored. With a hollowed-out space

in her voice, mother would reach out to us from our

cowering positions. Even under the screech of rusty

ceiling fan, we still hear her sobs. She thinks we don’t

see her stifle a cough. In her eyes, were many cities

—drowned and lost by her tears which were now a

prayer. And as the years would run by, my brother

and I would return to this prayer, legs deeped in the

water’s frothy wash, as our eyes met her qibla.

About the writer