Poetry

“We have a lot of insecurity in Nigeria. By road we are not safe. By train we are not safe”. (From a survivor of the Abuja-Kaduna Train bomb; Mon., March 28, 2022) Too many ills do a nation kill Ills just as many as the corpses That clutter every gutter Of our callously mis-governed country […]

NIGERIAN SUBSIDY AND THE REAL  SUBSIDISERS Here, in plain, unsubsidized language      Are the basic facts   About the fabled Nigerian “subsidy”      Whose endless lies have besieged our ears We the Nigerian people subsidize      The rampant CORRUPTION of our rulers We the Nigerian people subsidize      Their fatal incompetence and prodigal greed We the Nigerian people subsidize      Those […]

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 […]

When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they were thought to be business records, but what if they were poems or psalms? My love is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. — Jack Gilbert. […]

How often we find rest in the place for longing,  fame in the space of hiding,  the truth in the face of the neonates.  I’m taken by the fate of your scalp,  this brocade of tide, gulping at healing  a dead sight with sighs & jittery culls. How often light lords over our woe  & […]

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. […]

I am not terrified  of the dark. I do not know  if the arms of God  would hold me  like poetry has done  every time my floater resurfaces  as I spiral beneath the waves.    When I break, does God break too? Why must I do all the breaking alone?  Look at all the healing  […]

I it all started with a white school teacher  locking  her grade 5 pupils  inside  a classroom a black boy in a corner breathing slowly deeply      by the strength of his own legs frantically  climbing attempting  to escape by way of the classroom window,             possessed by the fight or flight   drowning     […]

history oft becomes second nature. a history of subservience is inferiority. history is sediment of time, sturdy like diamond to undo history, we ask time to become cannibal, which is to say we ask time to chew on its own fangs, chew itself back to the beginning, down to its innocent gums a history of […]

A Great Mourning I am learning to mourn All the parts that lay hidden In the whirlwind of my heart, Parts that were  Too sharp to leave Too alive for a dead world. I am leaving these parts  By the shores of seas And lands that remember my scent, I’m stretching until it feels  Like […]