Grief

Stirring pain, it would seem, marks one of the textual resonances in Nigerian poetry. This pain, which takes on grief grafted onto memory, for most Nigerian poets, is as personal as it is public. In his debut collection, How Morning Remembers the Night (HMRTN), Ifesinachi Nwadike captures pain-grief and poetics of verdant reminder. The treatment […]

today, i am the little crow that gloom has nothing against. lightning bugs find a home under my nails. i choose life, untethered from the clasp of time & existence. the art of living is not so hard to learn. there is beauty in the ephemeral. re-see these familiar elements. embrace the inalienable order of […]

Martin Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art describes language as “home of being.” He also describes poetry as a form with powers to disclose “being.” Saddiq Dzukogi’s collection of poems, Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), which is occasioned by the death of his daughter, Baha, wades through a […]

All the lights call it a day. All the marigolds go to sleep. The finches manufacture music from the latex of their throats. Let troughed tangled briars beg the earth for a moment. Let winter sit still & patient. There is no remedy to song severed in the neck. There is no remedial way to […]

The searing reality of grief began to creep into my life the year I lost my friend to death. It was on a cold-ridden morning in Benue, when a phone call from a friend from home broke the news to me. Stunned by the gloominess that pervaded the voice that delivered the news to me […]

for ek. today i will visit your grave after three years, I am eager to know what has become of your black stained chest. & at your burial, your dissected limbs that were placed side by side makes me think  of the doll’s limbs my little sister is spending  her childhood dissecting from its torso. […]

but I’ll wash you clean. Bring me the bath water and soap, I’ll have to wash you off my skin          off my tongue                  off my marrows, till you transform into a scum-flow I’ll trap in a bath bowl, un-forgetting to spill the water and the baby into a memory […]

you have cheated death so much the first time, you weren’t even alive. the angels are less fortunate than you are sometimes, i wonder how that makes them feel but you can’t tell someone how to deal with their misfortune you took too long to form that is what happens when God calls you Lazarus […]

for H & to H.   death seethed into a home & did not pass through the door nor the window; did not knock, greet or smile no one knew how it got in, but when it left you went missing. mother tried to remember a passage through in your sickness or a path in […]

The tragic exploits of killer-herders in Zamfara and Igangan, Edo and Ondo; a breadwinner razed in fire for the twin crimes of blasphemy and heresy by self-appointed custodians of faith and morals; orphans dying of the throes of hunger; a woman beaten to death for the womanly crime of being a wife and mother, the […]