If you want to know what love is,
do not trouble the poets. They are guessing.
Come and sit with me a while.
I will tell you about my mother.
She smells like flowers that woke before the sun
and kept the dew for themselves.
Every room she enters
remembers what light was made for.
In an unpainted house in Lagos
she planted gardens front and back,
and in the middle of those gardens she planted us,
five boys, watered daily with songs and discipline,
and the whole street knew,
whatever that family lacks,
it is not love. Go and see.
The house with nothing was the house
everyone came to sit in.
Ask the neighbors which is worth more,
paint or that woman's table.
They will not need time to answer.
On the days hunger came to test us,
she did not let it find children weeping.
She gathered us like a choir instead,
and we sang, and we prayed, and we searched
the pockets and corners of the house
until the house surrendered its hidden coins,
twenty naira here, fifty there,
a cup of rice, tomatoes, onions,
and the pot went onto the fire like a victory drum.
Call it poverty if you must.
We knew it as communion.
And when fever came for me, her first born,
no car, no money, no helper on the road,
she bent her back and took me onto it
and walked. Miles, she walked,
the red dust keeping count of her steps.
Understand this and never forget it.
A mother's back is the first ambulance.
A mother's back is the oldest road in the world,
and it has never once refused a child.
Then the ocean, and America,
and watch what the woman did.
She cut her hair like a soldier entering service.
She learned a new country by night school lamplight,
three jobs, a dying caravan driven like a chariot,
and still, still, the smile at the door for her sons.
Only once did i see the full weight of it.
From a window in a trailer park in Texas,
i watched her sit beneath a tree and weep
the tears she never billed us for,
then wipe her face, gather her strength
like a woman gathering firewood,
and walk inside to love us as if nothing.
I was sixteen at that window.
I have been keeping a vow ever since.
And when death itself came to sit
at the foot of my hospital bed,
she outsat him. Day and night, she outsat him.
And torn between her God and her son,
between the law of her faith
and the blood hanging dark above my arm,
she did not choose. Hear me, she refused to choose.
She took my hands and prayed us both into one boat,
saying if there is punishment, let it fall on me.
Take me. Not him. Not Onome. Not my own.
Go and search every scripture, every proverb,
every love song ever sung under any moon.
You will not find a greater sentence.
So if i ever love you well,
friend, lover, listener, stranger,
somebody's child,
know that it is not my invention.
I learned it in an unpainted house,
under fruit trees, beside a singing pot,
from a woman who gave everything away daily
and somehow, like the widow's jar of oil,
never once ran empty.
I am her deep heart, walking.
I am her prayer, still being answered.
— tachi