the sound his back made
(for daddy)
They say the drum does not knowthe name of the hand that beats it.But the son knows. The son always knows.Now the hand knows too. in a house where rain announced itselfloudly on the zinc roof,with a boy pressing his ear to his father's back,listening to that voice from the inside,deep rolling thunder moving through bone,and thinking, so this is what safety sounds like.This is what God must sound liketo the ones He carries. Let me praise the man properly, as a son should. My father, engineer and artist in one body,a man whose hands could build a thingand whose mouth could make a whole room laugh,teller of tales, keeper of the gift of speechthat he passed down to me like land.My father, watcher of the long road,who returned from far journeyswith a bag that opened like a small treasure house,biscuits, gifts, the smell of elsewhere,and a doorway suddenly crowded with sons.My father, who stayed behind in Nigeriaand fought for our survival with both handswhile an ocean sat between him and everything he loved.A man does not do that for strangers.A man does that for his own. And yet. Every true praise-song tells the whole truth,or it is only flattery, and flattery is a broken drum. There was a night. I was nine.The mathematics would not enter my head,and your frustration became a stormthat forgot whose sky it lived in,and a boy was made to speak a word against himself,again, again, until the word crawled beneath his skinand made a home there.Failure. In my own small voice. Father, I must tell you what that word built.Towers. Degrees stacked like sandbags,research posts, companies, machines that think,a life spent running from one sentence,Lagos to Texas to the very edge of space,and the word running with me the whole way,for no distance unsays a word.Hear me. No tower unsays a word. The son found his voice, after twenty-three years.The mother, keeper of all the family's rooms,carried the matter gently to the father.And the father, grown grey in his labors,could not sleep.Hear that and understand the man.He could not sleep.An old lion pacing the night,troubled that a wound he could not remember makinghad lived so long in the body of his son. And in the morning he wrote to me,and I will carry his words to my gravethe way I once carried his thunder in my ear.He wrote, you are the pride of my life.He wrote, please forgive me, Onome,and he translated my own name back to meas if handing me my inheritance a second time.Onome. Mine.He asked to pray a father's blessing over his son.He said the devil is a liar,that no weapon fashioned against me shall prosper,speaking scripture the way our house always spoke it,as bread, as shield, as native tongue. And I answered him as a son answers,with the truest thing I know.Father, no one is perfect.We are all living life for the first time,you included.You included, daddy.A man raising five sons with no manual,no rehearsal, first take, every day, for decades,on wages that finished before the month did.And still we were loved. And still we were fed.And still every one of us grewinto hands that build and hearts that feel.The man did well. So here is what we did, my father and I. He put down his guilt.I put down my word.Two men, setting their loads downin the middle of the road,straightening their backs,looking at one anotherfor the first time without weight. The scar stays. The sting does not.The storm is forgiven. The thunder remains,for the thunder was always love,love that sometimes lost its language,as love in hard countries sometimes does. And one day my own childrenwill press their ears against my backand hear that same deep rolling,the inheritance of his voice in my body,and it will only ever say,you are mine, you are made of triumph,you were never, never a failure. They named me Onome.My father himself wrote out the meaning.Mine.A man cannot be a failurewhose father, at the end of the long night,reached out with both hands and claimed him. The drum knows the hand now.The hand knows the drum.And the music they make together, at last,is the music they were always meant to make. I was always the son.I am still the son.Your son.Your pride.Your own. — tachi
next in the long tellings love in human form 