Uhm!

Failure is a word I learned the way I learned harmattan — not from a dictionary but from the
way it cracked my father's lips before he could finish asking God for rain.

My father is a verb I cannot conjugate in past tense. He slouched a cliff holding a sickle,
counting pods the way a man counts the last of something he knows is the last of something —
& I watched from below, learning the grammar of almost, the syntax of one more.

What is a cocoa pod but a sentence the farm wrote before it lost its nerve? What is a sickle but a question mark the hand makes when it is tired of asking?

You speak of failure like it is a country I have not visited. I have lived inside its longitude. I have watched what families of such men become — not broken, no, but load-bearing, the way a wall
does not collapse but simply learns to hold more than it was built for.

Call it the body's blind insistence — a thorn's hold on flesh, which does not ask for permission, which does not mean to hurt you, which only means I am still here, I am still here, I am still
here.

My father did not pray for comfort. He prayed the way the root prays: downward, in secret,
toward water no one on the surface believes is there.

To alleviate. To stand when things— (& things, they always—) To accept the dying that happens before the actual dying, & to stay anyway.

If there is a more purposeful life than this, I will need you to describe it slowly, from your comfortable room, where the walls have never had to decide anything.