Come, sit. The floor is cool.
Concrete keeps its secrets from the sun,
and a boy who lies belly-down on bare cement
in the furnace of a Lagos afternoon
knows a luxury no palace has learned.
The road outside was never finished.
The agama lizards nodded on the wall
like elders agreeing with the sun.
The world, as far as we knew, was our mother's garden
at the front and the back, plantain leaning into banana,
papaya standing guard, soursop and mango
dropping their sweetness like careless kings,
and five boys in the middle of it all,
barefoot lords of a green kingdom.
We tied our mother's fabric at our necks
and became more than boys.
A wrapper is a cape if the wind agrees,
and the wind always agreed.
We flew low over the compound,
saving a world that did not know it was in danger,
dying dramatic deaths in the red dust
and rising again for supper.
We hid and we sought.
Behind the water drum, inside the storehouse
where old radios slept among the things
nobody had the courage to throw away,
and Evan and i would open their bodies with our small hands,
priests of the screwdriver,
asking every dead machine the same question.
What made you sing?
And when father said the word, restaurant,
the whole house changed its weather.
A trip down that unfinished road was a pilgrimage,
and the negotiations began before the door closed behind us.
What will you take when we get there?
Jollof rice. No, fried rice.
No, sausage roll and a bottle of Fanta, cold, with the mist on it.
And then the treaty, solemn as anything signed by nations.
If i get jollof and you get fried rice,
we will share.
Half of mine for half of yours.
This is how brothers first learn economics.
This is how brothers first learn communion.
At night, when NEPA took the light,
as NEPA always took the light,
we lit the green coil and surrendered the house to its smoke,
and waited outside under the moon,
the whole family loose in the dark,
aunts and uncles and boys and stories.
We sang songs of praise until God leaned closer.
We sang songs that made us laugh until we fell over.
We sang songs that made the older ones quiet
in a way we did not yet understand.
Mosquitoes took their small tax from our legs
and we paid it gladly.
The moon was our ceiling.
We were never once poor under it.
And there was fire, once.
The generator, the funnel, the slipped hand,
the night the back of the house wore flames,
and father shouting for water, for soap, for sand,
ordinary things turned to weapons,
and i, searching the smoke for my brother,
crying out the words for the very first time,
i love you, please come back.
And Evan's voice returning like an answered prayer.
He had run toward the street, toward help,
already a healer before he knew the word for it.
Understand this. Even our disasters
taught us how to love.
Evan, who drew the chambers of the heart as a child
and now mends them as a man.
Jonathan, who arrived speaking a language
none of us could enter,
who carried more color in his skin and his spirit
than our technical house knew how to praise,
and forgive us, brother, that we learned your worth slowly,
you were the song in a family of engineers,
and the song is what everyone remembers in the end.
Joel, who came as the beloved baby
and grew into a deep quiet river,
watching everything, wasting no words,
banking his wisdom like treasure.
And Joshua, the last, the gathering of all of us,
builder's hands, artist's eye, athlete's stride,
charm enough to soften any room,
proof that our parents saved
a full measure of every gift
for the final child.
We were boys who did not know what the world was,
or what it would ask of us,
or that oceans and years were already waiting
to scatter us like seed.
We only knew the cool of the floor,
the sweetness of stolen mangoes,
the weight of a fabric cape,
and the certain, unshakeable knowing
that we were covered,
under mother's wing, under father's roof,
under God's wide sky.
Brothers, hear me, wherever this finds you.
The treaty still holds.
Oceans between us now, years between us now,
and still, if i get jollof and you get fried rice,
half of mine is yours.
It was always going to be yours.
It will be yours until the last plate
is cleared from the last table.
Come. Sit. The floor is cool.
There is enough.
— tachi