Ajibola Tolase

 

Upon meeting a Girl in Baga

You are the relic of a city.
I learnt the history of your body
threading the city borders.

You say stories are what we make of living,
I found yours in the language of fire.

In your stories, there are so many ways to kill a girl,
you mentioned salt on your skin
and how you were jihadi roast.

There are lessons only fire may teach:
we too, like some stones,
may burn our sins to be jewels.

I dream of those who fled the inferno
bearing the weight of night.

Unable to speak, they hold water
in their mouths in an attempt
to dissolve the language on their tongues.

In consciousness they are not part of us,
we are numbers, you say,
and the words become a bird of flight. Near vision

a bird perches on a twig and you claim its sorrow
knowing its home held the fire that burnt yours.

You open your palm before the bird
as if to give it its song. I ask,
where shall we go?

The bird knows, you say,
the sky has abandoned all its colours
that it may have us.

The argot of Grief 

The girls sat in the truck with their fears
clutched to their chests. They adopted silence

as though it were the language of sacrificial lambs.
They heard the rafters crack from fire, they watched

the matron’s body wriggle as though to object to dying
after her neck was slit. The new master ordered the truck to move.

They turned into the dark. The first girl who spoke
asked Alimatu what silence meant in her language.

Alimatu’s silence is the language of her brother
who died at the polls. It’s their argot of grief.

Her mother will learn it.
She will teach it to other mothers,

but now they wait. They wait
for the truck to come to rest.

Homecoming

The next passenger isn’t much of a talker,
she has a finger trapped between a book.
No doubt she’s had more education than I got in the army.
In a mix of Gamai and barrack pidgin I tell a story
in which I put Bensil’s intestine back into the hollow of his stomach,
the sun caught in his flinching eyes. I lean back into my seat,
Asa’s Fire on the mountain comes on radio, the next passenger sings along:
I see an army of a soldier man/ marching across the street.
I have seen it too, Post-Election Tudun Wada
bullets’ tips prodded a boy’s ribcage,
deflated his lungs and his balloons.
Her voice breaks: there will be nowhere for us to go.
I tell her what I remember of the Yelwa we are approaching,
I tell her about the green of her gardens that’s home to birds.
I tell her of butterflies and milkweeds, the red breasts of robins.
I tell her of my joy in the seasons of rain
when the geese have arrived with their silent white peace.
Before I settled into the story, she says there’s been two elections.

In Westgate 

for Kofi Awonoor
and when my father fell to death
a field dried out, a sparrow fled
—Adonis
I imagine Kofi teaching a poetry class
before he gave his name to a vocabulary of loss.

He says Begin with things we fail to remember
the book shelves and their galaxy of dust,

the red stilettos a child dreams to return in.
I have come here not knowing what to find.

The little class dismisses. I am awed by the frame
of this moment holding me and the stars as witness

as Kofi slips into silence
as though it were a kind of prayer,

perhaps, here is where he found the language
to negotiate his loss. I imagine now

how Kofi had exploded into tiny bits of stars.
What do I know of travelers who go in bits?

Perhaps this is how you test the waters,
an arm here, a foot there. Kofi,

who will receive you at the station?
who will share your sorrow

except the dust you have become?
Even the birds have flown, nothing lives here
only memory.

Waiting

In Libya, they wait in the belly of a boat
so dark they are tempted to believe

this is the longest night. They wait
for the vessel to take them to the south coast

of Spain where they will be games
for border patrol officers. There, Hugo

waits. He says Javier, two bottles of cognac
you don’t hit ten niggers in twelve shots.

They wait. Outside the boat, trade negotiations
hold. They sing the psalms they’ve brought from

southern Nigeria. A man stops to promise himself
to reach London, another sister speaks to her body.

She tells it to hold for Black Sisters’ Street in Brussels.
They won’t know they are captives yet.

Someone suggests they pray the boat moves,
they join their hands, shut their eyes and wait.