It’s Christmas in two weeks,
chicken has gotten more expensive.
At the cassava mill, Mother uses
the goalkeeper boy to sermon
the transition from boyhood
to manhood. She said he loved football,
now football is about to love him back.
I want to tell her football found me tender too;
yet she scarred my forearm for playing 5-aside
at the grassless school field instead of mopping
the oil-stained floor she asked me to, but I can’t.
The goalkeeper boy would be playing
in Europe come next harmattan.
Rumours say his father has sold half an acre
of family land to secure his passpord
and fisa.
At night, over a plate of stale beans & rice,
Mother says, her face aground:
the goalkeeper boy
has been stabbed thrice in the neck
with a chisel & left to die by the roadside,
ending his beginning
before it began. I await the part
she’d talk about
the moral of the story but she doesn’t.
The story
is the moral.
NEPA takes light and I candle the room.
Soft smoke plumes the air. Her hands tremble as she reminds me
of our Oron neighbour who burned
her wedding pictures
after death took her husband.
I want to say something – anything –
but I’ve been taught to respect the old & the dead.
She sighs and asks if I remember
how the boy swore, once he settles
in the white man’s land and gets his first pay,
he’d have the city grassplanter plant grass
on the school field that’s never had grasses,
that he’d send shoes so his friends would stop
losing toenails from playing
football barefoot.
I nod as she speaks
of the boy’s mother.
Grief will make a fool
of her beauty.
I ask Mother if it’s too late
to allow football to love me back.
She says nothing & presses her thumb
hard into a melon seed
until it splits clean in two.
When I rise to clear the plates,
her hand finds mine and she says:
do not mistake flight for freedom,
the sky swallows even its own birds.
*Photo by Lesly Juarez on Unsplash