What’s Gone is Certitude; Janazah; One of Those Nights in Agbowo – Three Poems By Nigerian Writer, Abdulmueed Balogun Adewale

What’s Gone is Certitude

For Akorede Ebunoluwa

If you return tonight, like a bird to its heightened nest,

I’ll build you the marble castle of your ivory dreams,

An assembly of angels will do your laundry, a god will scrub

The floor of your silence-plagued room turn it into a mini elysium,

An elf will fashion your bed out of edelweiss

And make all your wonderful dreams blossom into a universe of delight.

If you return to us, your friends and colleagues,

We will discard, like a heap of trash, the towering aches in our gloomy heart

Into the blinding gut of oblivion. I will carry your small blue leather bag for you,

Cease pseudo-pilfering your bottle-shaped umbrella from the ever agape pouch

Beside your bag, meaning: I’ll quit being a cute little troublesome thorn to your

Lovely being, meaning: I’ll do more giving than taking.

If you return to them, tonight, your family,

Momma will make you your favorite pastry,

She’ll part ways with the gloom curtaining

The window of her bliss, she’ll cease to

Shed an ocean when all eyes and ears are

Out of sight.

If you return, your little brother will carry

Out all assigned tasks diligently, he won’t

Make your heart race before compliance,

He will start seeing you as a rose, as porcelain

While bearing in mind that you too, like

Everything, can wither.

Ebunoluwa, daddy’s home tonight pacing back & forth

At the front gate awaiting your divine return, he promises to give you

All the love he withheld from you like hemlock. If you return

Tonight, to us, in full flourishing flesh, our aching hearts will cease to ache.

Janazah

The Muslim Ummah of my University

Just lost a peaceful soul to the cold fangs of Malakul Maut

This morning, even the Masjid joined in our grieving.

Everything is palpable under the right set of conditions, stepping

Into the Masjid premises, I could taste silence on my tongue, sharp like grape,

Feel its cold embrace around my aghast chest like the tender body of a beloved.

I saw arrays of people, the aged and the young—

Some whom we took similar courses last semester…

The males separated, as the tradition dictates, from the females,

All seated in their grieving plastic chairs under the shed of towering trees

I cannot name.

Their faces hold a somber memory similar

To the one I encountered on the faces of mourners— relatives, well-wishers,

Fulfilling all righteousness, and enemies at my paternal grandmother’s funeral.

Indeed, this dunya is nothing in the sight of Allah.

Even the wings of a mosquito are dearer to him, The noble Prophet (PBUH) enunciated,

With a thunder-frightening baritone, in a sound Hadith.

Indeed, we are sojourners, here in this serpentine

World on a brief recess. I am waiting at the first row on a green

Mat in the masjid for the janazah—

The final offer, ritual to our deceased brother,

While waiting I conceived a prayer like a neonate in my aghast chest:

May Allah forgive his shortcomings and grant his family

The fortitude to crash out of the ootheca of gloom.

One of Those Nights in Agbowo

Dusk has plotted another deadly coup against dawn, darkness is on the plague-loose again:

An unmoored boat gallivanting across the sea. Night is here at your door step, an impostor, facing you tête-à-tête like the fears you’ve been shunning since birth, now which hole will your timid soul, dear self, scurry into like a threatened ghost? The narrow, squalid streets of this city always flooded by billions

of hasty legs, whenever sunlight rules the sky, now echo the faint lament of sauntering feet, weary feet returning from factories, from places they never dreamed of earning their daily bread even in their weirdest dreams. It’s a common knowledge, practical life likes bullying us into making love with our fears, into shoving the forbidden down our needle-thin throats.  I’m outside on a wooden bench, my fair skin neighbor of a year whose name I do not know, wish to know but  lack the might to bring myself to do the asking, is carrying out his nightly rite again: perfuming the air with the pungent fumes spiraling from the stick of his ganja, fumes that always turn my entrails into a warzone, unnerve the slumbering worms in my stomach. I lift my supposed aching behind, a ruse, to ease the six-feet long wooden bench of the stress induced unto its fragile spine by the task of shouldering the weight of three grown men but in truth, it’s to save my dear stomach from passing through the seven gates of hell before dawn reigns supreme again.