24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
Abdulrazaq Salihu, TPC I, is a Nigerian poet and member of the hilltop creative arts foundation. He won the Splendours of dawn poetry contest, BPKW poetry contest, Poetry archive poetry contest, Masks literary magazine poetry award, Nigerian prize for teen authors(poetry), Hilltop creative writing award, and others. He has his works published/forthcoming in Bracken, Poetry Quarter(ly), Rogue, B*k, Jupiter review, black moon magazine, Angime, Grub Street mag and elsewhere. He tweets @Arazaqsalihu; instagram: Abdulrazaq._salihu. He’s the author of Constellations (poetry) and hiccups (Prose).
Prayer by the side of the night
May the body not be a room filled with smoke
May the bones not tremble into a glass shattering
I’m knowing my body, by marking my wounds
I’m knowing my country, by passing the blame
May the slope, slide us into perfection
May the music yield us demons, us angles
The night is failing to bloom
The night is failing to rot
May what has passed, not hold
What’s to come,
May what’s here not hold unto us too much
May the night not fall, May the music never stop.
In commemoration of the lost people.
There’s no loss unless there’s something worth
Searching for, worth giving a found-it tag.
In a black bus in sarkin pawa,
A woman aches in righteous anger
For all the people the bandits’ bullet
Was fortunate enough to retract from earths fine skin.
I know her ache because I,
Too, have nested my ruin in communal faith.
She didn’t want to bend towards the ruin
to become a body of light,
she didn’t want to be
Refracted into a bent rainbow &
tap colors from all the music our
home has gradually learned to fade into
But the heart carries its ache more than the
body sags to its own burden.
she starts a gbagyi praise song and lost her
voice into the part where the musician said “god if i fall,
lift me, and may they not laugh at my fall”
and to say this with eleven episodes of hope,
she breaks her accent into an accident of several casualties:
my body is the most injured.
The aching silence shoots through her mouth
and she sings her voice into pebbles.
It’s in her sprawling and sparkling body that
I see our communal birthmark: black
Smoke-stain traced perfectly into a broken country.
I speak to her with my Gods tongue: no fatigue,
nor disease, nor sorrow, nor sadness,
Nor hurt, nor distress befalls a woman.
She put her hands into mine and I can texture
the coarseness of her pa(lm)in,
I carry all the burden she has come this far to annihilate &
today I’m unable to bend/fold into a prayer,
so I attempt my gods accent again and verily and
verily it’s in the remembrance of lost people
Do hearts find rest.
I tell my story, from the genesis
Of Sarkin pawa like country song
On a patriots mouth. The radio
Flourishes in broken signals in a distance
That is yet to be of us,
My not yet [dead] father; perfume
In the world, whistles to the rhythm
Of a sad song.
I cannot let the evening take
My people away, I cannot sing
With my peoples tongue,
I sway & sway, till the story goes
Far from my mouth
Even farther from being told.
War I.
I peel the night from its mothers skin: darkness,
barricade my mouth with smoke like letting
Letting euphoria-filled bodies fall into
A synchronous rest-sleep —slip into reality —
I, prayers by the mouth of a wound. I,
Wound by the mouth of a country. I, country
Beside the open-milky body of water —pour
Into the silence, pour into the noise.
I cast my suffering, atop the brown
Ruin of a war, I sing, in silence
Like lovers, on the verge of death.