We Are Cut From Shorter Days
Anthony Okpunor
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you will speak through the mouth of a sea
& know i’m not dead.
one day the sun will rise on your tongue
& give a language of salt and mercury.
i will be there in the water, locking
a song of grief in your bones
but to us it will be happiness, to us the world
ate its shadow before our birth.
today all poems will smell of incense
before sundown
& the sky will put to birth, your tongue
should know the taste of rainbows by now
just that this is how life grows its branches,
by bleeding all of our stars.
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Anthony Okpunor is an emerging Nigerian writer who discovered poetry and writing in general, as a better form of self expression. He is a student of the University of Benin, Nigeria at the time. He was shortlisted for the 2019 Nigerian Student Poetry Prize. He was also shortlisted for the SEVHAGE/Angya Poetry Prize 2019. He emerged as winner of the 2019 Kreative Diadem Annual Creative Writing Contest (poetry category) for his poem, “Ode to Our Body on Fire“.
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Posted in Boudin 2020, Poetry and tagged in #anthonyokpunor, #boudin, #mcneesereview, Poetry