Poetry

Oluwakemi Solaja photo

By

Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale

Noun(s)

Noun(s) are the names of boys

Praying their souls to the wind

Hoping they become a word on heaven’s tongue

Names of girls at the coast of memories

Dancing to the wild beat of fate

And the weird beat of waters- how they hold a boy’s skin with the tales of a sojourner, sojourning from east to west

They are the names of fishes

That lives in the water that drown men in themselves

And in the wetness between a maiden’s thigh

They are the names of birds

Coursing through the hills and mountains

Surrounding the folklores that holds beginning of things

The folklores about strange figures at night

They are the names of places

Where survival is breathing without air

Places h(a)unting our eyes with photographs of boys weeping with their father’s pictures

Photographs of gods mocked by dogs for calling themselves God

Names of places that holds the silence of cold rooms in a girl’s body

Places where everything carries the smell of sweat and blood

They are the names of things that hold us captive between our bones

Things like the last thing a mother saw

In the eyes of her son- before he left for Sambisa

Things that rapture our bodies with nursery rhymes

Like the rhyme about two little black birds

Sitting on a wall; one named Nigeria and the other Biafra

Nouns are the names of ravens

That plaits the air with the music that kissed us into elegies

Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale

Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale is a Nigerian poet and writer, who hails from Boripe local government area of osun state. He is a graduate of mathematics from Federal University Lafia, Nasarawa state. His love for art helped him to find his way through poetry and his works has featured in different anthologies, blogs and magazines. He goes by the pen name; Undiluted Poet.