Best Poems Written by Sobur Adedokun

Learn a New Language

Your joy runs into peace into happiness 
into laughter before it becomes a highway 
without a stop sign - the shiny black asphalt 
and the breeze caressing your face teach you 
that fate is not ugly everyday 

A song strikes your tongue like a string 
and the vibrations say happiness say joy 
say a soul that has mastered all the languages
that loss can speak. You are a man who  
can speak loss but prefers to sing the songs
that stick to your tongue when you travel
on this asphalt road. 

Before songs started sticking to your tongue
you tried wrapping vowels from the language 
of loss into the flowers you took to her 
grave - until she visited you in your sleep with 
all your flowers and all the vowels in one arm
and told you to just learn another language.

Now you do not have to hide vowels
in flowers to know that there are languages
where good grammar is only drowning 
in sticky songs until you can no longer 
float 

Sometimes you walk by men whose loss 
has broken into crippled syllables 
whose letters might never stand together 
again and you say learn a new language in
her glassy voice as if you had stuffed your 
throat shut with silk handkerchiefs

Copyright © Sobur Adedokun | Year Posted 2017