Ode to Things That Cut
Poems about justice and love — South Sudanese Marial Awendit
Ode to Things That Cut
*
I may allow you to play a wolf
Heavy with the want
To be intentionally mistaken for a dove,
And any furred bits to name you wolf
Can meet shredding fury.
*
Come wearing honest hunger.
The white dove picking things in the woods
Will not wait for you to redden your teeth,
And the tender green herbs did not grow
Into a pawed trample.
*
Fly with the kites,
Fly with the hawks,
If you wish every wolf should
Grow wings to catch birds.
*
The caterpillar boring through leaves
Is covered with so much of itself
To wear your furs, and the butterfly
Sitting upon your back will never qualify
For a goat’s red thigh.
Ode to the Owner of Lights
1
My cords to You have been cut
By my toils to bite the honey
Dripping off them.
I was told: ‘a baboon that jumps to pluck the sun
May end up touching the land’
2
This hot joy of my travel landwards
Has plucked off my Icarian wings.
What is craving sight?
A gorgon? Wet leaves?
A slippery rock holding unbreakable silence?
My decadal laughter stored in breathing mud
I am not sure will break a falling angel.
3
A cloud of white wool
Upon a land of soft foam,
A millennial audience to my falling feathers &
The ocean everywhere will not erase
My blood for glee.
A reed basket to float me across the Red Sea
And let all flaws mine drown, forever.
4
My mortality is also a give away
Only to those who lack one.
Somebody can own breath like the earth.
Somebody is capable of owning other things
More than breath.
The priest says he owns God more than his body.
5
The serpent still has a tongue and
The Voice is still minting green apples
From dry things.
The heavenly lamp glows for everybody.
6
You owned me before I was made visible.
7
Maybe light is a speech.
Maybe light names.
Maybe light comes before sight.
8
Dark is not dark enough
Until everyone is blind.
9
Did you say anything close to mercy?
I beg the trillionth repair.
A fallen milk tooth regrown
Can still cut apples:
Renewal is also existence.
10
Everything is seeable
With the owner of light.
11
I am a blind man set for a night’s journey
& this quiet wick of mine is capable of lighting.
My stumbles are from most things
I cannot see.
I feel so much love that my stumbles have been your pain.
12
I was not asked if I wished
To be the beautiful flower
The absence of rain dries or the rugged rock,
To be the skin & the wall around myself.
13
Honest gravity will hold to us,
Dead or alive.
Still with the earth upside down.
14
Let these blazing lanes be the calm
Through which I walk to the future’s planes
Perhaps with Kevin Carter
Perhaps the universe will bend
With me to pick this child,
Mothered by war,
Now clothed by air.
Perhaps with Kevin Carter,
God plucks a rootless feather
Off a vulture.
What is Present Today?
A chip of dead skin,
A torrent of light light..?
Some people just lack bodies,
And the time to savor a search
For a pin slipped into the ocean.
Some people just need new planets
To pitch their tents and dream away
Every old world.
Marial Awendit is a South Sudanese poet and essayist. His poems have been published in Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review, African Writer, Praxis Magazine, Best New African Poets Anthology and elsewhere lit. He won the 2016 South Sudan Talent Youth Award for the category of Best Poet and the 2018 Babishai-Niwe Poetry Award.
