Easter Bouquet 2025: Third Day, Still Breathing, by Oluwaseyi Daniel Busari

Oluwaseyi Daniel Busari is a budding Nigerian writer/poet. He's an avid reader of African poetry, drawing inspiration from Christopher Okigbo, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Joseph-Jean Rabearivelo. He's a forever student of language and linguistics, highly intrigued with language and its usage.

Third Day, Still Breathing

The night was a fist, clenched and cold,

Spitting out stars like broken teeth.

The wind whined in the hollow of skulls,

And silence gnawed at the bones of belief.

They dragged him down where the dark was thick,

Where the grave was a mouth, gaping, greedy.

No rooster sang, no curtain tore,

Only the rustle of coins in traitorous palms.

Morning came like a wound unhealed,

Bleeding gold into a city of graves.

Mothers clutched the air where sons once stood,

Fathers swallowed their silence like swords.

Hope hung limp from the rafters of faith,

A carcass swaying in yesterday’s breeze.

They whispered: He is gone, gone, gone,

And the earth, unbothered, turned its face.

But listen, footsteps in the belly of stone,

Fingernails clawing the ribs of the earth.

The tomb, once a throat swallowing light,

Spat him out like a name remembered.

The air, drunk on something ancient,

Split open and swallowed the night.

The grave, a beggar with outstretched hands,

Was left grasping at nothing but dawn.

And there he stood, pulse of the morning,

Breath of a world remade in fire.

The sun crowned him with its quiet blaze,

Wind wove hallelujahs through the trees.

Death, that old thief, fumbled for meaning,

Found nothing but footprints in the dust.

The city stirred, shook sleep from its bones,

For the stone had rolled and time had turned.

Run now, tell it from rooftops and ruins,

Let the echo outrun the fear.

The cross was a door, not a dead-end street,

And mercy walks where the mourners weep.

He was buried, but the grave was hollow,

He was silent, but the earth still speaks.

This is the song, the shout, the breaking.

Third day, still breathing.