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.