Dancing on a Minefield.
Image by Olaf on Unsplash.
Dancing on a Minefield
They say God knows best,
So they pass the pepper soup
And turn the volume up.
Laughter, loud and reckless,
Tumbles through the compound,
Bounces off the brown roof,
Spills into the streets,
Where children beg with empty bowls.
The youth service handbook says:
“Corpers should make ransom arrangements.”
And someone tweets, “Wahala for who no fit board plane.”
200 retweets. 500. A thousand.
But no one asks the question.
They mock, they jest, they laugh,
like men who didn’t know
their feet danced on a landmine.
But they knew.
The man with the loudest voice.
The one who laughed first, hardest,
Stood in the center, clapping, stomping,
Hips swaying to a song only hunger could write.
No light? They buy generators.
No fuel? They walk.
No money? They adjust.
They always adjust.
The song rises,
A chorus of mouths moving through misery,
A choir of unpaid salaries,
A harmony of broken dreams.
The louder they sing, the less they feel
the ground beneath them.
And then, mid-spin, mid-laughter, mid-song,
His foot pressed too hard.
First, the music stopped. Then explosion.
For a second, silence. Then dust.
Then nothing.
The next day, they say God knows best.
They pass the pepper soup.
They turn the volume up.
Art from Europeana on Unsplash.
We Move?
Everything is costly, even the air.
The price of foodstuffs rises like floodwater,
Dragging the poor by their throats,
While the rich float above, untouched.
In government halls, they feast,
Fattening their pockets, raising children
Who will never sit in our crumbling lecture halls.
Their sons learn law in London,
While strikes teach ours the meaning of patience.
Their daughters birth heirs in Houston,
While ours give birth on hospital floors—
If the power does not fail mid-delivery.
For a hundred days, a teaching hospital
Bathed its patients in darkness.
For a hundred days, they learned
That to be Nigerian is to be your own electricity,
Your own government, your own savior.
And the men with guns?
They are not protectors, they are wolves.
Police, EFCC, Customs - pick one,
They all steal with the authority of a badge.
They do not ask for bribes,
They take them with a gun aimed at your ribs.
And if you protest,
You become a lesson in silence.
Yet, we remain.
Not because we love the suffering,
But because no one suffers as smart as we do.
We will find a way, we always do.
No fuel? We move.
No light? We move.
No jobs? We move.
Another tax, another ban, another evil decree?
We move.
But some do not want to move in circles.
Some want to stop living life in resignations.
And for them, the price is steep.
A visa is not a document;
It is a luxury, a gamble, a prayer.
The embassies have built walls taller than our dreams,
And beyond them, the world is folding its arms.
They tell us: stay and build,
As if we have bricks,
As if we have land that will not sink us.
So we stay, or we leave.
Either way, we pay.
Art by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash.
LET’S NOT TALK ABOUT OUR GRIEF.
Let’s not talk about our grief;
Not about my friend wrapped in a mat,
Lowered before the moon could claim him,
Not the earth closing over laughter I will never hear again,
Not the empty echo of a name unsaid,
Not the ache coiled around my ribs,
Not the silence where his laughter should be.
Let’s not name the thing gnawing at your bones;
The silence of white rooms, the ticking of time,
How your body is at war against itself,
How the future feels in your hands,
Uncertain, slippery, terrifying.
Let’s talk about the days before loss learned our names;
When we were only two voices in the dark,
Loudly laughing between the miles,
Building a home in the green glow of our WhatsApp.
Let’s talk about the night you called me a fool,
Softly, like a secret, like a name you’d say again,
When I thought, maybe --just maybe--
There was room for me between your words.
Let’s not name the things that have left us;
Not the ribs that hollow with loss,
Not the hours that pile like a junk-eating kid,
Let’s talk about mornings without weight,
Where love was an easy thing,
A small golden bird that landed in our hands,
Where nothing had been taken,
Where no one had learned to leave.
Come, lie with me, lie to me.
Say you are fine, say I am whole,
Say this ache in my chest is nothing but wind.
Let us bend time backwards,
Unspool the sorrow, pull the thread--
Before the body, before the burial, before the bruising,
Before the days turned dark,
Before the gardens turned graveyards.
Let’s talk about something else.
Tell me a joke, a dream, a wish,
Tell me what you think about love in that voice,
Tell me a story where no one is dying,
Tell me a story where we never learned to grieve,
Art by Mario Verduzco on Unsplash.
The Visa Interview.
They ask if you have strong ties to Nigeria,
As if this country is a rope worth knotting around your waist.
You say yes, though you dream of departure.
You smile, though your palms sweat.
The man at the counter does not smile back.
He looks at your papers,
Examines your name like an unfamiliar currency.
He frowns at your bank account,
As if poverty is a crime you chose.
He asks why you want to travel.
You do not say, “because my country is a sinking boat.”
You do not say, “because the air here thickens like smoke.”
You do not say, “because I do not want to die in Ibadan.”
Instead, you say, “For tourism.”
You say, “To see the Eiffel Tower.”
You pretend to be the kind of person who takes vacations.
He stamps something, hands it back.
You look down;
A visa, a rejection, a decision made in seconds.
Outside, the others wait, reflective to the letter,
Shifting on their feet, praying to their gods,
Their lives summarized in the files they hold.
Their dignity stripped off for validation.
Some will leave, some will stay.
Some will return to their fathers’ houses,
Unfold rejection like a letter from fate.
Back home, mothers will ask, “How did it go?”
Fathers will sigh and say, “Maybe next time.”
Friends will call with careful voices,
Not wanting to step on broken dreams.
And life will go on;
Here, there, or somewhere in between.
Image by Charlota Blunarova on Unsplash.
Situation of the Living.
We are born wailing—
Lungs baptized in the cruelty of air,
Wrenched from the womb’s warm amnesia
Into the frost-bit arithmetic of waking hours.
The world does not curtsy at our coming;
The sun does not stagger in its orbit
To sigh, “Ah, a new soul.”
No seraphic trumpet, no hallelujah
Only a mother’s sweat,
A father’s cracked laughter,
And the midwife’s calloused palms
Already primed for the next harvest.
And so begins the unravelling.
Bones betray their softness,
Voices sink into gravel,
And innocence hardens into stone.
We are taught the ledger of living.
Laughter costs breath,
Love costs blood,
And Time is a butcher
Who never forgets the price
Of each trembling second.
What are we but feral elegies,
Dragging our shadows
Through dim hallways of forgetting?
We etch our names into granite,
So the world will remember us,
But the wind is a patient thief.
Tongues rot.
Monuments buckle.
The gods get drunk on incense,
And forget the masons who raised their altars.
We glut ourselves on wisdom,
Yet starve for meaning,
Clutching scriptures like shipwrecked men
To splinters in a storm.
The prophets are dead,
But their echoes remain,
Scratching sermons into
The ribcages of the desperate.
And what is faith but a fever?
What is prayer but a voice
Hurled into the abyss,
Begging it to have ears?
The world will lurch forward
Cold, indifferent, absolute.
Hearts will shatter
But the markets open still.
Coffins will be planted,
Lives will be harvested still.
Cities will burns,
And the earth will sip blood,
Without complaint.
Still, we love,
Though love is a long, deliberate suicide.
We chase beauty,
Though it wilts mid-capture.
We sing,
Though silence stands at the end of every stanza.
We press forward,
Though life is a beast that waits
To drag us quietly
Into its unlit mouth.
What magnificent fools we are;
Naming our wounds as if they were kin,
Fearing death, yet courting sleep each night,
Bargaining with a timekeeper
Who’s never paused to haggle.
Still, we raise trembling goblets
To the trembling dawn,
We laugh with cracked teeth,
Kiss like it’s the last language left,
And dance, shameless,
In the eye of every storm,
Knowing the wind will have us in the end,
But making sure it meets us singing.
