Raphael d’Abdon's Poem


Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 2, Number 2. November 2019. ISSN: 2581-7094


Something waits at your feet’s track

(for my brother Raven, 27 September, 1965 – 7 August, 2019)*

glossy black
feathers
rise and fall
like coal dust

damp wind
child of a swollen sea

cold running through us…

chains unclasped and left empty
in the blue where they pretend to wade

in a poem’s
sleeping voice
in a dream
we will remember
in a prayer
filled with memories
that own no words

beams of light drag to shores where fate
answers
eyes alive from the cracking ice

there
something waits at your feet’s track…

the last air to breathe…
the last wishes…

(pretoria, 10 august 2019)


* Raven Aflakete was a poet, filmmaker and arts educator. Originally from San Francisco, California, he relocated to Ireland where he carved out a name for himself as a dynamic performer and ardent art enthusiast. He drowned in the Baltic Sea while on holiday in Lithuania.