As I voice out these words,

I remember that my father had three voices,

the voice he used for my mother,

the voice he used in speaking to us,

and the voice he used for his kinsmen.

He had no voice for himself and his god,

though he said that he would have time,

to speak to himself and to his god when he died.

I can imagine my father mumbling to his god,

when he’s on his way to his ancestors,

blaming him for the way he was cast upon the sand.

What else would he be doing with his fellow dead,

if not, making them get used to his new voice?

The grave would echo his loud, lone voice,

when he blasted his dreams and tantrums

through the waves and storms of the grave.

He said that he would return once or twice,

but there would be no thrice.

I wondered if he dismissed his full resurrection

that deals with three comings to bear fruit,

or whether he would start creating sequences

which no one had ever seen or heard before.

The voice my mother heard from my father,

was the cradling of a flower during a flame,

something that began with tongues of yellow fire,

and it was the hammer, death nails on wood,

or the voice that fell the oak that dried in summer;

the same voice commanded wealth with a guitar,

singing to his ancestors the pain of his lingering,

when, with one deadly blow, time lashes out at him.

How often I tried to speak to my mother like my father,

with the voice of a man tormenting spirits asleep,

but she stirred as a queen roused to fury,

and ordered me to await my time to grow,

when time itself runs out of things to say

to a man whose moment of victory has come.

Sometimes, my mother forgets that we were there,

while she waited to hear my father’s voice,

calling her from behind the bedroom curtain,

to hurry up, as the night is far and deeply spent.

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah