I have, with time, with care, with a delicacy that only those in mourning could understand,
folded you into the spine of scripture, just so I could remember that there was a god.
I found my prayers were meant for the deaf.
How could I breathe, let alone lie again, when you had been robbed from me?
I have allowed you to dream in ways wherein serpents were scarfs.
I watched you choke and gasp, while you called it warmth.
Safety, I did not have the courage to speak of it, it was not meant to be survived.
But, if we were to be sincere, there was a particular comfort in vices.
My palms tingle from the heat of your blood, you had to bloom flowers from your body.
There is a shame that dances to sympathy and bathes in pity, it gets drunk on its own nudity.
It is in how eyes quickly shift and how demeanour changes,
I wondered when you’d be honest about the weight of that kindness.
I would never ask that you live again.
I want to beg that you forgive me but there is a soothing, in the sound of maggots eating you.
I do not have the heart to allow an encore, the moon gorges on your woe to the point that even the sun has forgotten to rise in the morning.
You would break me to my grave had you stayed.
You were me.
Ethel Mafwila is a Namibian poet and aspiring novelist