The Outsiders

They linger where the lantern light dies,

Invisible shadows wearing borrowed skins,

Eyes like mirrors cracked by silence and existence,

Breathing the dust of nightmares dared and told.

Their voices are rivers with no mouth,

With songs unpinned, unhinged from the throat of time,

Stanzas and lines erased before they even rhyme.

They are not storms, yet thunder follows,

not ghosts, yet doors refuse to close.

They leave no footprints, only questions.

They lay bare riddles that the earth half-knows.

We speak of them as absence clothed,

as if the night itself could steal a stare,

but even absence has a border, has a presence. 

But them, they walk beyond, unthreaded, bare.

They come on the hush of broken drumbeats 

that no dancer dares to follow,wearing the decay of forgotten despair with

faces veiled in ancestral rites.

Between the fire and the silence,

between the living and the dead,

they are the gods who lost their story.

They walk where Legba bars the gate,

yet carry no offerings in their hands.

We call them shadows, we call them night,

but they are more than fear implies

they are the outsiders, the unseen eyes.

📸: #freepik