By: Joseph Hope

Epistle for the dead and Lost

1
How dead is dead?
When fishing for the impossible,

How much hope is enough?

How things die?
They begin from Genesis,

From the swinging cradle

2
The morale from the long walk
Through this unvegetated paradise,

Is that best things are found lost

Lost to wander: tongues and hearts
Amidst lost tongues and hearts,

And the lost finds comfort with the lost

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Who will tell the wind?

The wind rubs her nose on the window’s pane:her way of speaking. Eighteen adults walks backwards into Genesis without their pants on. What’s the spirit saying? Is it saying that all men are naked?

They will learn how to sew—that how babies evolves into flowers.

Last night I was taught how to die, how to build my spirit with hard bricks: hewed from sacred stones. We were made to sit and listen to echos: any voice other than ours is pure enough. We bleached our skin with sacred air. Ravaged our tongues with holy Psalms. Planted our hearts inside a hidden pot, so no man can find them.

The Heart don’t need blood—it needs something purer—like a black soil.

The wind smashing the window’s pane, breaks into the room—breaks into our lungs, to find her answers: why we are been watered like plants? Why we are evolving into something she can’t see?

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GENESIS

It all started from Genesis
Where we had checked in and now

Checking out into the
roads that ends in

Various rooms with white
Doors and steel walls

Transparent like a mirror
So all men could see their souls

And find a path
If there is any

That leads back to Genesis
where it all began

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All I see

Dust replacing dust
Gush of wind blowing
Replacing and been replaced

Nothing is actually there
Wants paints the picture:
White, black, everything

Scenes replicating
Rearranging into a muti-facet mono-picture
Of what can and may not be

A Running river: filled and emptied
All I see is hope shattering
Into hope over and over

###

Gift or curse?

They loated our gift:
We talked to ourselves
They fear it was a curse:
we hear and understand voices

Left to roam and be lost in the ocean:
Supposed we’re wanderers
A sack of rocks and elegies served in a cup
They called it a parting gift

A curse?
That seamless voices
Croaking in nude, in flaming verses
While we see in the dark

A curse?
Those visions that startles the soul
That home found
In-between realms

Realms meant for either God or gods
And it scares them even more
More than ever
That we are gods
 

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Joseph Hope is an aspiring writer from Nigeria. A few of his works have appeared in other publications.