Memories Sometimes Are Like Photographs

Can dust desert a desert?
Water run from rain?

I am a river blocked
all my waters folding into me
I am a dam of still memories

Look,
when you said Goodbye
did you not hear a voice that screamed in the dark,
"Lama Sa-bac-thani?!"
At night when I am alone,
I pluck your voice in the strings of silence
I trace your face in the moon’s rays
for then, the moon sings to jilted lovers
love songs that go home.
I knit you in poems,
weaving you soft as Arabian silk
making sheets of memory
that clothe me in this cold.
For memories stay,
they are souvenirs, tattoos, scars
flickering embers of your beautiful fire
canoes to your beach where our seas collide
pages torn out,
sepia photographs,
of all we used to be in colours.

O. Chiedozie Kelechi
Danjuma. (A personal edit)