Lined With Totems

By Shitta Faruq Ademola

For you, i write these lines lined With totems, and emblems openly joined
as rudders for life... Eriata Oribhabor.

 

a bird is in my heart a bird is in its heart another spring of fire burns like flame
in the bird’s heart; its wing is a yellow rush of water dropping
by every bits of a mother’s dark sweat. i try to swallow the fire round my heart’s ponds & make myself burn like the coal pot mother made suffer - yet enjoys the sweetness of soup.

 

its beak is thorns plucked from the East of ancestry forestries - they choke my heart and made me gush blood to form streams.
another bird runs to my heart it finds a place there - builds streams for the worship of the goddess holding the liturgies of failed testimonies. it cooks, fire blazing under the three stones.

 

Shitta Faruq Adémólá from Nigeria is a poet and writer. He believes in the power of poetry as an instrument to heal the burns in a heart, the tears of an orphan and the home to Noah's ark. He has works and forthcoming in; The Trouvaille Journal, Parousia Magazine, Ngiga Review, Communicator's League, Down In The Dirt, Eskimo Pie, A Country Of Broken Boys: Boys Are Not Stones Anthology and elsewhere. When he is not writing, he is holding his pad for Dream League Soccer, playing Scrabbles or listening to Simi's sweet voice.