BODY OF SHRINKING MEN

By Hajarah Adokutu

Robust, round, orobokibo

The plum flesh, a vitality signage

Like the neon sign 

Which blares into the sight in the dark night

The same night, 

In it the shrinking steals in

Shrinking away vitality from your leathery skin. 

Your plum arms which has cradled me a few times too many

Now in time looks like a twig garbed in flesh

A thinly veiled flabby limb. 

Eyes recoiled at the sight 

[Of tracing your clothed skeleton with my sight] 

My plumb fingers traced the bones of your stubs

As I carved and etched into my mind your features

Praying age doesn't steal these from me

The way it had done to your frame.

My Dad said he feared the shrinking more than death. 

In my mind it seems like a vain thing to say. Who doesn't want to be a skinny Queen before their death? A chiseled face in its Sunday best or plain white cloth. A body which would be light to lift but given how death works, it will be a heavy burden to bear and carry. 

Now I know this shrinking steals from you. It steals the very thing we need to hold dear before death; it shrinks away your dignity. 

You become a figment of yourself, A frail old elder to be napkined, diapered, helped and fed. 

Maybe it was my dad's independence that screamed into those words I took as vain. 

Maybe it was fear that strung those words into the sentence. 

For I had witnessed a shrinking and now I know the fear; The vitality of health becomes a closet which holds no clothes, not even cobwebs. To be just a frame of a lone hanger covered in dust. 

Now, I too fear the shrinking before death.