Hereticum by Nnamdi Ndiolo (Day 27 of KSR 31 Days of Poetry)

This credo begins in the name of the father,
and of the son,
and of my fractured spirit.

Our father, drunk in psalmodic wine,
hollowed be thy fame,
for thy paradise became wilded with thorns
from the day the sky forgot
how to vowel my pronouns.

Each day I wake up is a resurrection,
for I die a little to stay alive—
my body, a crucifixion.

You made my heart a monastery of regrets,
and of all beings,
I was born a holy war:

a frigid canyon moulded
from the light of Elohim,
before Eden knew Babel,
after Lucifer’s seduction.

I fell, from
your
grace
& your tears rained on me like
a streak of divorced rosary beads.

You made me a metaphor for heresy,
a prodigal son whose bones sing his
father’s praises as a threnody—
the heretic’s creed.

Glory be to the chaos that ricocheted
in my flesh till my tongue became its grave.

I, an apostate of hell:
Hail my body, a temple empty of grace—
my godless body, a bodyless god.

A lover of fantasy movies, Nnamdi Ndiolo is a young writer from Southeastern Nigeria who grew up in Enugu and Lagos. A longlist for the Ake Arts and Book Festival Climate Change Poetry Prize 2022, his work is featured in The Lumiere Review, The Kalahari Review and is forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, Thanatos Review and elsewhere. He enjoys listening to great music and would never refuse a plate of garnished Nigerian jollof rice. He currently lives in Port-Harcourt, tweets at @mirrorofbryan, grams at @firelord_bryan and is also available at ndiolonnamdi@gmail.com.