I sit next to my mother’s
raffia skirts,
recounting the living bones
and tracks of dead dreams.
I linger along the pool to drink
alongside the ferocious wolf
on the fragile belly of water lilies
like a culvert, valiantly I flow.
I pour into the sea,
images of those who should have lived
to war with wingless birds.
I am stuck with uncertainty
I have fallen victim
of the virtuoso of my motherland.
And when I asked for tears
I got words galloping and crushing,
flowing out of themselves
as this poem is far from home
and the poet is in the corrosive
cob of hungry spiders.
but before my coldness burns
& my warmth returns,
I’ll send whispers to God
that my country is starving and
needs a retouch like a woman’s hair in her nineties.
Akinola Amina
is a poet and a lover of art. Her poems are up or forthcoming on The Shallow Tales Review, The Kalahari Review, Ngiga reviews, Al miraatul magazine, Poetry journal, naija readers buffet loudink home of art, Poetry Tuesday, Writers Hub, and My Woven Poetry. Her poem was shortlisted for the Arise Africa writers contest 2020 anthology & she writes from Lagos.