The Bird’s Heart Stilled by the Roar of the Inferno

He used to call me his little eagle. He’d hoist me high on his shoulders. From that perch, I could see the line where the burnt sky met the thirsty land. He said an eagle needs the sun on its wings, needs the vastness to learn to fly. He called laughter a bird’s heart. Once, I held a piece of charcoal, I wondered, where did the wood go? How did it become ash? Ash, my fascination since childhood— the way it drifted, weightless, from the smouldering remains of our hearth. I’d watch the grey flakes spiral, wondering how something solid could become so ethereal. I learned its language— the fine, delicate dust that once held form, now formless, spread by the wind. It was science, it was magic— wood to powder. The day the inferno came, The guttural shouts clawed at our door like ravenous birds. His voice met them head-on. Father. “Go out through the back. Now.” We ran like panicked animals. Mama clutched my hand, My little brother with vacant eyes. We didn’t look back. We couldn’t. Days later, they said he was ash now. What is ash? A new beginning? The wave of a goodbye? Finality clinging to the air after the last ember fades. The space a star leaves behind. A charcoal sketch on the ochre earth. Ash can’t hold laughter, can’t tell stories, can’t build a fire that chases away the night. I held the urn, cold and heavy in my small hands. It sits on the mantle. Sometimes, I open it, sift the ash through my fingers, searching. But there’s nothing, other than the sound of my heart yearning for the sun on my wings. I see a ghost-moth with inked wings flitting around the room in a ballet in the same wind that carried the inferno’s roar. They trace the outline of my father. Sometimes, I swear, I can hear a sound like a bird with broken wings calling from the sky. “Soar, little eagle. The sky remembers your wings.” But when I chase the sound, it dissolves into the dust, And all I’m left with are insects, around the empty socket of a burned-out sun.

Nwodo Divine is a Nigerian writer and editor. He earned his B.A. in English and Literature from the University of Benin in Nigeria. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetrycolumn, African Writers Series, Alan Squire Bulletin, The Winged Moon, and other publications. He is currently an editor at Akpata Magazine and a submission reader for The Word’s Faire.