Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “In the Dark” by Uchechukwu Umezurike.

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In the Dark

By Uchechukwu Umezurike

A voice slaps my hand off the light switch

in the corridor branching into the toilet. Don’t.

My body clasps itself, stalling its urge to pee.

My heart flaps, a bird with one broken wing

in the brush of my chest. Curtains quiver

in the window. I cannot see his eyes. I only

sense him sitting on the chair by the standing

lamp. An idol rising from a trance, a quill

of moonlight between his feet. In the morning,

my mother would speak like a seer: Your father

needs the dark to return. Watching him now,

I feel his lunar breath around me, so close,

the hum of our fridge. Hear the clock’s nocturne

of two soldiers marching

in a field—loud and louder. And I wonder

if that is what my father is listening to.

But he speaks again, warmly as the air,

Son, black is not what we should fear,

for it is in the dark we see ourselves clearly.

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Copyright © Uchechukwu Umezurike

Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike is an assistant professor in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Canada. His critical works have been published in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Journal of African Literature Association, Men and Masculinities, Journal of African Cultural Studies, amongst others. Umezurike is the author of literary works such as there’s more (2023), Double Wahala, Double Trouble (2021), Wish Maker (2021), and a co-editor of Wreaths for a Wayfarer (2020).

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