Of Dreams & Ocean
In my recent dreams, I see shades of ocean & longing,
where waves are pages & horizons bleed into untold stories.
Each night, I slip into the mouth of the sea, a traveler with no compass,
only the pull of tides roaring secrets in a language older than my skin.
In one dream, I sail through skies of silver, where the stars dissolve into
foam, & the moon dips low to kiss the ocean’s spine.
The air is heavy with brine and hope, & I breathe it in,
a taste of unseen words.
I’ve danced on the cliffs of forgotten isles, where waterfalls speak in
Poetry & the sand remembers every footstep.
I’ve crossed rivers that flow backward, their currents carrying dreams
upstream, to places untouched by waking eyes.
Salt clings to my lips like memory, a reminder of the weight of water,
of the tides within me that rise & fall, unbidden.
The ocean calls me home, but I am already there,
adrift in its endless grip.
In these dreams, I am more than flesh; I am a wave, a ripple,
a horizon folding into itself. I travel not to escape,
but to find the edges of my being, a shore that will never stay still,
a story that never ends.
The Science of Survival
The water churns like a broken equation, its chaotic waves defy
Newton's laws, momentum stolen by gravity's silent pull.
We are bodies suspended between forces:
air too light to hold us, water too dense to let us rise.
The boat creaks under our collective weight, a fragile vessel,
like the dreams we packed into sacks & prayers.
Boyle’s Law squeezes the air from our lungs,
compressing hopes under the pressure of borders that will not yield.
We left home like photons escaping a dying star,
pulled by the promise of light, pushed by the gravity of hunger,
of villages eaten by desertification, of cities corroded by greed.
Our suffering maps onto the Second Law of Thermodynamics:
entropy s p r e a d i n g, order collapsing.
The Mediterranean laughs at our attempts to cross it,
mocking our understanding of Archimedes,
taunting our faith in the buoyancy of resilience.
We are particles in Brownian motion,
battered by currents, colliding with indifference.
Back home, tectonic plates shift beneath our feet, fault lines of
inequality cracking open. The earth trembles with the weight of
unspoken truths, seismic waves of corruption reverberate through
the soil we once tilled.
Yet here, in this expanse of salt & struggle & prayers,
we find ourselves reduced, not to molecules or atoms,
but to a single equation: survive or succumb. Our movements
rewrite the theories, our suffering demands a new law.
The stars above us are silent witnesses,
ancient & unmoving, their light reaching us from a time
when we were not lost. & yet, even as the waters rise,
even as the currents drag us under, we hold on to one thing
that no theorem can explain:
hope, a wave we refuse to let drown.
Ókólí Stephen Nonso (He/Him) is a Nigerian writer whose poems have been featured in Feral Journal, Ebedi Review, Brittle Paper, Ngiga Review, Praxis Magazine, The Shallow Tales Review, African Writer, Adelaide Literary Magazine New York, Olney Magazine, Tuck Magazine, Ofi Press, and elsewhere. His short story has appeared in the Best of African Literary Magazine. He has contributed to both national and international publications and anthologies. He is a joint winner of the May 2020 Poets in Nigeria (PIN) 10-day poetry challenge, first runner-up in the Fresh Voice Foundation Poetry contest, and third prize winner of the Akuko Magazine Inaugural Prize for Poetry 2021. He was also shortlisted for the 2024 Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature. His bio was included in the 'Who’s Who of Emerging Writers 2021’ by Sweetycat Press. You can say hello to him on Twitter @OkoliStephen7.