A butterfly's soul in a moth's body

Photo: Jared Arango

One thing about butterflies is that they wear faces that look like the masks of a thousand places.

When light is entrapped in the body of darkness,

it has no choice but to sneak out its mighty hands-

to erase the sinking ship in an image and paint a beautiful tower-

where demons are turned into colourful butterflies. This is art.

Have you ever wondered why butterflies are decorated with a thousand ellipses?

And why they never cease kissing and flirting with flowers?

It's because they were born after my father found his mistakes

at the corner of his mouth and began to peel off the veil from his dirty skin

behind the door of heaven and in the presence of the abobaku who

was buried after the king resurrected in a girl's womb.

Evert day, I see. I open my palms like maps to the smiling sun and see my fear

reflected on the faces of a man and a palmist.

The lines on my palms are the map roads that lead a palmist to the place

where two demons met at the base of a dark waterfall,

where they formed a new kind of love with the souls of butterflies perching

on every grain of silence and a mouth singing the hymns of an ancient Greek story.

A silhouette walked into the sun and came out with fear and a red lamp

Then, a radio said:

This is the home of captivity and chipped valour

painted with the sweat of prisoner and saliva of felon.

This is a body caging a tethered soul-

A butterfly's soul in a moth's body.

My brother's body is now like my body.

It wears a bag of flesh lined with roasted bones and fresh flowers.

His body now tangos with pain on dusty ground,

now sings beneath the dim light of a street lamp standing in

the middle of an empty street like the moths from the devil's lake

when flames kiss their wings.

I still have this body - flesh strong enough to imprison a soft

and gentle soul hoping to come alive from the deepest pit of a bottomless heart.

Father, I've been bearing this weight.

That's why I bring you this shovel to help me bury

this flesh below the sand of the underworld

and in the eyes of the children of old ghosts who offer naked clothes.

In the silence of a graveyard, flames are meant to die, so am I,

so is the flesh below the sand, so is my brother's body, so is the kiss that sets a soul free.

About the author

Nwaoha Chibuzor Anthony is a Nigerian poet and novelist who lives in Orlu, a sleepy city in southeastern Nigeria. His works have appeared in Nantygreens, Kalahari Review, and elsewhere. He writes to keep himself sane.