God, if there’s anything entering this piece, let it be a breeze not another flood.
No one gives news about a war without splashing blood on faces, without digging a hollow, without an arrow or a sword inside hearts. Tell me the best way to sing a dirge. Or the best way to pronounce someone’s death. There is nothing like he died while sleeping, emptiness had already filled the body, and a well is already dug inside the relatives. Everyday, we count dead ones like grains—if it is not an accident, then it is fire, or water, another water case, and again, flood.
***
I’m to submit an assignment on Monday. Today is Sunday, and the assignment is the water inside a coconut—I do not know how to solve the puzzle. Gracias to technology, to the white men, oyinbos(as we call them), to Google. I switch on my data for research, grieve news, find a seat on my phone with a headline: Fire service recovers two bodies from Ilorin River. Again! dashes out of my mouth.This is how an ukulele turns a dirge. This is how water alchemizes into a witch. This is why Prophet Muhammad said, teach your children how to swim…
***
Some weeks ago, I was watching TV to feed my curiosity of what earth devours or yields, since no day is bereft of threnody these days. Weather forecaster said there’s a 90% chance of rain, high thunderstorm, winds SW at 10 to 15km/h. I didn’t know what all these meant, all I sensed is that rain would whip us thoroughly this year, and some houses might be fragmented. He said, beware of driving in the rain. This is true, but how do we explain who sits in the shop and gets crashed by a truck? Tell me what to use in curing an illness caused by water. Isn’t this the way water operates—serves us well before it gulps us, like a ram fed before being sabered? That week, farmers, too, prayed for a drought. What is useful about a knife if it can’t cut an onion but can draw blood? Tell me why I should befriend water when it’ll only cause hunger.
***
Anytime I pass through Oloje—an area full of brown-pan houses, full of corners where spades never seize to emerge, where Tayo hunts Titi flickering around after her closure from shop, where boys rush into adulthood, where memories of nights burning like a candle under the silk of moon are engraved—I envelope some supplications with my palms, requesting safety against being devoured by flood. God, envision our leaders this spoilt road, convince them to lay it as their bed. Panic is another apprentice of death. Afterall, what kills us first (even inside the water we always use) is fear.
***
It is funny how death is a fair judge—knows no name, takes anyone present in the next page of its diary. How each page has its own fingerprints. One Saturday, 13 June, 2020, sky raged. Squeezed out almost all the water it houses, and dug a canal on the Asa river bridge in Oko-Erin. Swallowed a car containing five bodies, vomited two alive, one dead, and bank the remaining two. Do we beg the nomadic water to throw out the remainders, when it has even forgotten its origin? Do we call God a bystander, or the government, or the people?
***
Every time I dream of houses on the shores of oceans. When I wake up I ask myself these questions: when would we pave ways for water to pass? Do we hope for rain to halt? Won’t we stop tearing up the land by deforestation? Do we put our safety in the government’s mouth for decades? When would we stop misusing a gray road?. No one teaches you to work. We’ll have to begin by digging gutters within communities, near houses. We’ll have to pave senescent roads carefully. To keep reporting bad roads to the government. Don’t manage what would harm you; exile it. Don’t overlook a lake; it might become an ocean. Don’t embrace yourself with darkness—wait! Open up for light; it shall stretch unto you.
Abdulbasit Oluwanishola, SWAN V, is a young Nigerian poet and essayist who writes from Ilorin, Kwara State. He’s studying Agriculture in Usmanu Dafodiyo University Sokoto. He is the winner of the PCU Eid Celebration on-the-spot poetry contest 2023. He is shortlisted in the Dawn Project Writing Contest 2023. His works are up/forthcoming in A Long House, Kalahari Review, Visual verse, Ninshãr Arts, World Voices Magazine, Full House Literary, and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter/X @OO1810107.
Featured Artwork:
Rock and Chain
Fabio Sassi is a photographer and acrylic artist. He enjoys imperfections, and reframing the ordinary in his artwork. Fabio lives in Bologna, Italy and his work can be viewed on his website.