after Ocean Vuong’s For love, and the love of surviving it

Even if it cannot rescue me.
It is still here.

Death settles on my wrist
like dew trembling on leaves.
The customs officer keeps yelling,
To the bunker!
His worn-out voice cinching
the darkness around my throat.

Everything has turned inside out
within the chamber of my body;
the mirrors of buried things
throw my face back at me.

It is so still here.

Birdsong filters through
the marrow-deep hush.

I recognize a man’s desperation
by the way he grips a thing.
Anything becomes a weapon
when held by a hand
hungry enough for blood.

I, too, have held a poem
until it learned how to rupture something—
the way a blade enters silence
and leaves it changed.

We plead for life
when what we truly desire
is to lie beneath
the amber warmth of hope.

Every morning,
the Adhan moves through me.

It is so still here.

I rise into the thunderous dawn
and perform ablution.
I count my prayer beads
and lean my life
toward becoming.

Believe me,
it is not faith’s absence
that leaves me starving.

This hand—
tender, silken—
the one I have reached toward
all these years
is only an arm’s length away.

And I fear
my grave is no farther.

It is so still here.

I can read desperation
in the way a man’s finger
caresses the trigger.

The gravedigger stands waiting,
his shovel beside my ghost.
Red earth will fold over my body
without a grain of pity.

And the worms—
they will celebrate
whatever remains
of my hunger.

It is so still here.

I have looked directly
into the frozen eyes of death.

But love—

you are a country I still believe in,
a warm light glowing
between the teeth
of my grave.

Author’s Biography

Hassan Ismail Adekunle is a Nigerian poet, reporter, and creative writer whose work explores the human condition through memory, love, loss, society, and the fragile architecture of hope. A graduate of Political Science from Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto, he earned a Second Class Upper Division and was named Best Graduating Student Journalist of his set. His work has appeared in Brittle Paper, Borderless Journal, Eunoia Review, The Nation, TheCable, The Galway Review, Kalahari Review, and other literary and cultural platforms.