Chibuike Ukah

I give my sister credit for hating land,
when the Earth is full of rocks and glass,
and she is not one to swallow much sand.
I give her credit for living in the wind,
unable to fall into a trap or get kidnapped;
the sky is not falling like pebbles from a mountain,
but there is nothing to hold things together.
She hates grass when it’s wilting;
she hates sand when it's heated up.
no healing rises from heating the soil,
and no treasure lies beneath the sky.
How she loves to hope to fly without feathers,
though she can’t grow wings from eating cassava,
or feathers from wearing a thousand dresses,
except what her mother tells her every day.
If she must fly, she must be like the eagle,
dying and returning like lightning in a storm.
But my sister loves to gaze at the stars; 
in the morning when the Sun is yet asleep;
or in the evening, the Moon visits her,
though it arrives with a cup of clouds,
she doesn’t require much to survive in the house of air.
Even a handful of clouds could quench her hunger,
which she chews like flesh from her fortitude.
As for falling and rising, she has no fear,
for when she lives in the sky, she falls on the galaxy,
she who is high fears no fall to the ground.
She says the tall trees and flowers are her kindred
the Iroko and the oak, the yew tree and the ivy,
the mahogany and the Hyperion, the Meranti,
the mountain ash and the Sitka Spruce,
are all the green ancestors of my loving sister,
with whom she shares a common affinity,
like speaking and understanding the language of spirits,
which comes to her while she walks in the air.
When I stand in the middle of a famished road,
trying to have a heavenly glimpse of my sister;
she seems to hide in a cluster of leaves and sun,
doing what I do not want to understand
keeping me waiting until the rain comes with thunder.