child of my mother
on November 9, 2025
after Nikki Giovanni’s “resignation”
(for you, you, & you)
i love you
because our mothers say nothing is more worse
than eating alone
so we eat iyán & ègúsí from the same bowl
brotherman
you who would wrestle a blue whale for my sake
i love you
because of all the steep mountains
& the hills we've climbed to the top
& still climbing
i love you
for all your dry jokes & dark humours
how after P’s dad burial
we sit in a room & make jokes
so dry in our throats we coughed up laughters
despite the grief
despite the world & it's burdens
despite the country that doesn't give a damn
about it's citizens dying
i love you
way before i thought of writing this verse
blood of my blood
because you create space
hold space
& share with me the magic of your smile
i love you
for we feed on each others energies
for replenishment
on days when our insides are hollow
days we walk days we run
days we grow wings & fly
i love you
& your Yorùbá-British tongue
night after poetry-after-dark
how for a moment
we were so still
the space between us
saturated with sweetness
i love you
so much i could build a shrine in your name
build a village with an amphi
–theatre where the world would go to learn
the art of kindness
i love you
child of my mother
(ẹ̀jẹ̀! whose mother is also my mother)
because we don't live
only by the blood running in our veins
we live by the rhyme & rhythm of our wor(l)ds
i love you
no be today e start my guy
we must have been friends pre-birth
soulmates in the sea of souls
before we were gifted these bodies
i love you
because the blood of our covenant
is thicker
than the water of any womb
Sodïq Oyèkànmí is a 2022/23 Poetry Translation Centre UNDERTOW Fellow. Winner of a 2024 Best of The Net, and 2x Pushcart Prize nominee, his works have appeared/ forthcoming in Chestnut Review, Frontier Poetry, ONLY POEMS, Passages North, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor at Lucent Dreaming. Find him on X @sodiqoyekan