AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



NEVERTHELESS BY OLATUNDE OSINAIKE



When I walk into a church, I only see pictures of white angels. Why?

—Eartha Kitt


I want to take this time to focus on the timeless, as certain ones take up arms to remove the lifetimes of those like me. My favorite word above: a dove that sounds like I forgive myself, like a red redacted, like a gospel according to the camaraderie I can make cousins out of.


There is no new ecclesiastical under the sun. No shortage of my people sporting basketball shorts beneath true religion jeans. We reincarnate every morning in these precincts with the good news delivered more than once already. The protests of messengers sent down, the blaze


after the crossfire, a chosen people who are either a jaywalk away from the love of our lives or our lives left to love. I have found that

the self can be its own exodus, be a black sitcom or an intercessor for the one who waits but never goes. When I say my favorite word,



NEVERTHELESS BY OLATUNDE OSINAIKE continued



I think of how often our joy can become a win-win, how the pores of

a mother can cup holy water. Some say the world is still becoming,

but no, our angels trumpet our timbre. They are in the streets where peace is sold separately and critique is still, policed. They stay in the cut


and on exhibit, like a glass-stained window meant to color the light. Know we have everything in common. Nobody move. I need to capture this moment where we are one with the unease that stomachs

us like a morning rush. How we might fill in the blank with our story, our chalices next to paper plates, our fried and our black-eyed, our dressing, our Lawry's, our fridge tetris, and most of all, most of all, our seconds.





SOURCE: Tender Headed, poetry collection by Olatunde Osinaike, Akashic Books, New York, USA, 2023, pp. 58-59.