Squally Throwinka

From The Harmattan Oracle

Prologue of the Sand-Walker

I walk with sand in my shoes—not the English kind, that pale shiver of crushed seashells, but the stubborn amber grit of a continent that followed me across water long before I knew what inheritance meant.

Some nights it gathers by my bedside like an elder calling my name in a voice powdered with distance.

Mother’s sigh, caught between two continents, still drifts in my dreams like a tired bird choosing which sky to belong to.

Father’s shadow steps behind me too, straight-backed in the manner of men who expected pavements of gold and found instead the cold sermon of concrete.

Yet even concrete listens when the bones beneath it remember home.

I am the Sand-Walker—conceived in one land, birthed in another.

One foot chalked in England’s rain, one foot dusted by a sun I have not seen in decades yet rises in my chest every morning like an old DJ cueing a favourite track.

There are dance steps still trapped in my spine, and a palm-reader’s whispers folded in my fingers;

I have sold dreams, lifted bodies, plucked melodies from the ether, pressed paint into queuing canvases—a restless man, gathering lives like small shells in a coat pocket.

But this evening-year of mine asks for a different pilgrimage:

to build with words that my parents could not release,

to—lay down poems like stepping stones toward a home that never learned to forget me.