"A Way of Seeing" (Abayomi Animashaun)

"A Way of Seeing"
(Abayomi Animashaun)

If at night you enter a forest with a lantern—
Flame, risen and warm against the glass—

And the mast of that ship within you is blown,
Caught, and alive with wind,

Pull your oars in from Reason’s sea.

If later within that lantern,
The flame thins and dies,

Owls from the deck’s dark corners will emerge,
Singing like your dead grandfather,

Playing flutes like his wives,
Drunk and dancing upon the stern.



"A Way of Seeing" by Nigerian poet Abayomi Animashaun appears in the current issue of Passages North. His 2010 debut collection is The Giving of Pears, where he explains that "In writing these poems, I saw the page as a sort of living room, where I could go to have a party."  He writes in The Adirondack Review: "One finds it a wonder how poets become so absolute in their rejection of other poets’ methodologies, especially when the doors to poetry are infinite." He teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin.