Featured Writer: Salim Yakubu Akko
The Face of Death
Staring at the shell of the harmattan stars
Under the shadow of death
Ignoring the wars of the world
Of cockroaches and mysterious dinosaurs
Then before I wink my eyes
Like a fired comet I was chased
Helter-skelter to the gloomy hole
Of horrific animals and one-legged phantoms
& I reminiscent nothing in the hole
But my encounter with a hag
Shouldering a black shaggy scarf
Not knowing it's the ugly face of death
My Memories
When I remember
The beautiful garden
We used to sit
My eyes turn red
And my teeth shiver
When I remember
The beautiful memories
We shared in mother's arms
My smiles wilt like a flower
And I terribly quiver
When I remember
How we were count glistening stars
How she shrouds my pains
I feel lonely
Like to jump into a monsters’ river
The Requiem of a Hobo
my body was eaten, like a fruitless plant by the wind.
mother sat with her perched mouth
supplicating for a safe home.
but it's never the same; the road was painted grey.
I looked into the eyes of the rumbling sky
then a voice came, broke the door & chewed the cayuse. then my legs hovered, like a cursed lame.
I'd no burrow—a place I could call a home. and the winterwind gave me a blanket of cold, and there, I read the threnody of a bum. and I wrote a requiem—how I slept in the cold; how I died and resurrected in the winding wind. I wrote in silence, “if I'd have known, I wouldn't have stepped out from mother home.” I missed the soft palms of grandmother. I missed the poems of my bed. I missed home.
Salim Yakubu Akko is a writer and poet. He is a World Voices Magazine’s Nigerian correspondent and a guest contributor at Applied Worldwide. He has his works published/forthcoming in Upwrite Magazine Nigeria, Scratch Poetry Magazine, Calabar Poetry Magazine and Trouvaille Review.