Tonight I'd like to post a poem that the Nigerian poet Sadiq Mustapha recently sent me. I must also add that Sadiq has stopped by some of my poetry group's events on Zoom this summer. I hope that he will be able to read some of his poetry to us before we return to face to face meetings.
Lost tongue of displaced bodies
on the day it started my mother's
laughter grew into a wail
her old transistor radio carried
the message of the end
the one that has her lover's name on
time's book and has turned her into a
whole city of treasured memories
we read
aloud from a postcolonial love poem
to find our displaced bodies, lost languange,
diminished love, to over come the mind's civic unrest
and the violence of a pandemic:
my mother losses her tongue to grief;
sadness has a way of stealing sanity
we went to the hospital
my aunt's daughter is in coma
but, hospitals are arbitrary abattoirs where women
are slain at childbirth
she woke from death to meet coma,
womb damaged and removed
after childbirth.
the next day
the new child died
of breathing infection
no machine to aid.
still she is in coma,
we held prayers for her soul to unite
with her body, burnt incenses and danduwala
to chase hanging spirts
Yet she floats in coma.
loss is violence
it butchers the heart into chunks of meat
we are displaced by these losses:
each making us a lost colony of grief.
there is a lockdown
there is venting
there is the world gasping for air through ventilators
stomachs searching for fill
the numbers are multiplying and death is, deftly having it way
we have consumed more grief than we have consumed food
my mother switches off her radio
she no longer want to hear anymore of death.
Author's note:
The word Danduwala is not an English word. It is a name of a perfume used in the northern Nigerian to exorcise djins (spirits)
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"Sweet Mother" is a popular song. Here it's performed by Prince Nico Mbarga, Jr. and Rocafil Jazz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9TGZftpGVo
Jazz guitarist Femi Leye plays at the 2015 Lagos Jazz Festival: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbocB9YuUyY
Wow! bought tears...
ReplyDeletemarianne this piece of poetry is very moving .I rea d and reread. the more i read the more it touched at my heart strings l .Thank you MR.Sadiq Mustapha for writing such a touching poem .The poem left me reflecting about the trials we as a society are facing during this trying time.thank you marianne for posting .
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