Evanescence: The Sacred Sin

Evanescence is not 

a sin. It is the truth 

that nothing holds still.

Love arrives, 

and leaves, and 

that is why it is love.

Thoughts rise, 

and dissolve, and 

that is why they are true.

  

We are borrowed fire. 

We flare, we warm, 

we go out —  

and the universe 

does not ask anything 

but candidness to self 

...and sojourners. 

So let me be heretic to the permanent.  

Let me worship the passing.  

Let me believe that meaning 

...is not kept in a vault,  

but scattered — 

in the steam off tea,  

in the last note of a song,  

in the way 

our names sound once,  

and then become memory.

If there be 

an after, may it be this:  

that I did not wait 

...for permission to be alive. 

That I love without escrow.  

That I look at the vanishing  

and did not call it empty, but holy.

Because everything holy,  

by its nature,  

does not stay. 

-Amami H.

Ojodu, Lagos 

July 26, 2026