Meditations.
In this poem, I am a tarred road on a burning street.
In my mouth, doves coo with
sores in their throats and lightning breaks out in their wings.
I am a poet with a broken heart for rhymes.
My poetry is what they call a love story with woven fates-
-twisted like lobes. I metamorphose each time I write.
I meditate. It is the autobiography of the wounds
hidden inside my flesh. They narrate the tale of death,
as it threw fire in my father’s chest as its tongue stripped my mother to shiver.
What does it mean to write of your burn?
Of the scars fashioned on your forehead as ornaments.
What does it mean to salivate into clean water,
and find out that the sea is nothing
but a body unburdened with flesh.
Writing is how I lose my body.
It is how I find my form,
and lose it again.
take this pain, just take this pain away.
spoil this song with arrhythmic levels of sounds.
Cradle me out from a frying pan into fire in a reversal.
to be a poet with a tiny, fragile heart is not a tale for
museums, where the teeth are a gallery for display.
lord, he be tinz may pesin heart dey quake like bomb,
and I am folding gently into a snail’s destiny.
this pain, lord, this pain is burning like the sun
during summer. grief is a bastard, sometimes. like,
he won’t tell you to not give your heart to a lady that would take
you for granted,
he won’t stop you from walking on a hill whose keepers are
scorpions that sting poisons. I renounce
myself to broken bottles. Lord, just take this pain away, take this pain away.
Shitta Faruq Adémólá, Frontier XIV, is a 2021 SpringNG Writing Workshop alumni, a young Muslim Poet, digital artist and Fiction Writer From Nigeria. He is the author of a microchap “All I Know Is I Am Going To Be Beautiful One Day” (Ghost City Press, 2021), and Night Club With Dogs (INKspired) 2022.His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Jalada Africa, Beestung magazine, Blue Marble Review, Serotonin, FERAL, Harbour Review, LOLWE, Rigorous Magazine, Icefloe Press, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the Fitrah review poetry prize, 2021, the BKPW Poetry contest (February edition) 2022, The World Voices Magazine’s Poetry Contest, and tweets@shittafaruqade1
