The Emperor's Verse
Original literary and poetic work, given room to breathe.
Richard Nkwenti
@TheEmperor ·
We are salt and signal, the long arithmetic of light, a coastline remembering the sea in the language of stone. Say it plainly: I was here. I was afraid. I stayed anyway. And still, we answer.
Richard Nkwenti
@TheEmperor ·
My grandmother's hands are in mine when I am patient with slow things. Somewhere behind my face a village is still standing, still carrying water, still naming children after weather. I am not the beginning. I am a continuation, and the debt is one I am glad...
Richard Nkwenti
@TheEmperor ·
The body remembers what the mind has filed away — the season, the room, the particular grey of that afternoon. Grief is not an event. It is a tenant. You learn its footsteps and go on living in the same house.
Richard Nkwenti
@TheEmperor ·
At three in the morning the world is honest and unstaffed. I keep its company the way one keeps a difficult friend — for the truth, not the comfort.
Richard Nkwenti
@TheEmperor ·
The field has gone to seed and does not apologise for it. Everything golden is also leaving. Everything leaving is also, somehow, still here — the light, the long grass, the enormous quiet of a thing that has finished and is not yet gone.