

We Will Birth Waterfalls
by U.A. Edwardson
My brother says there will be a river in the sky, someday soon.
It will be a cascading multitude of bodies who will not
fear to be naked and black, subscribed to knowing the sun.
— the almighty sun — my brother says people will conquer it in the
future, build themselves cities of light and prosperity… Sometime,
everybody will be a shadowing ray (a kind of unclear thing which
is hectically boundless) because in this present, we are darkness.
He says there will be a forest of lilies in the sun, everyone will
become, each, a butterfly succouring brightness — that in us,
we will birth waterfalls of beauty; untimely pixels; children who
are made of bits of laughter and are freer than the freest breeze.
My brother says there will be walls of mirrors, roads of purity;
Heaven will burn in jealousy, and everything will be a reflection
of everything — say we will behold ourselves and see farms of
roses, the sea, and mountains of ice — we will be a careless beauty
and nobody will care that they are built of transparent clay. He
says I will look in his eyes and see eternity. There will be no end.
Our mother will not be a flower of dust, her epitaph will bloom
into a reckless song. Our father will not be an ark of authority and
angst, in his body we will bend time and defile paradoxes; and
a widow will be the face of a morning moon, effortlessly cheered.
There will be another Africa, and it will be an embroidery of
dreams.


U.A Edwardson (they/them) is a queer writer of color from Ahoada, Rivers State, Nigeria. They are an undergraduate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and the second place winner of the 2021 SprinNG Poetry Contest. They have works featured/ forthcoming on FOLIO, Solarpunk, DREICH, Stick Figure Poetry Quarterly, Eboquills, African Writer, Madness Muse Press, Disquiet Arts, Afritondo, Sub-saharan, and elsewhere. They won honourable mention in the Dan Veach Poetry Contest 2021, and are a semifinalist for the IHRAF Creators Of Justice Awards 2021. They gram @ua_edwardson, and tweet @eddiewatson31.
