Captives
Life and time have held us captives— turned
The moon an imposter in the affairs of the night.
The justice-chirping canaries of yesterday have buried
Their preaching flute of freedom songs under heap of clay.
Now our dread-riddled minds during these stony days
And perilous nights, itch and pine for a barrage of healing songs.
But for the sake of fish for their potbellies— they have
Turned bridges into giant walls, sutured mighty roads
Of yesterday to a spider’s web. Wordsmiths like all inhabitants,
Dread to unveil within the verses of their poems— the blazing
Resentments buzzing in the crevices of their hearts for the
Captains steering the ship of this land, for graves here reek like
All other catacombs of the world, yet, with tons of promising
Dreams. They will, brethren, definitely come knocking on the
Door of your minds tonight, asking with the bellow
Of an angry Egyptian bull after this rebellious bard,
When they surface like a full moon, keep me in clouds
— unnamed, save another star from premature fall.
Note: Italicicized passage from rom Akeem Lasisi’s “Ori Agbe”.
On Clarity, Fear, Perfidy, & the Illusion of Hope
With this, I do not seek to appear
draped in flowing flawlessness before all eyes,
I am also a pin underneath some people’s feet.
I only want the little whisperings
of my antique mind to be expressed
this time around without the interference
of guilt and the encroachment of the bilious past.
Hope [want] or the illusion of it
sustains impoverished lungs…
so I still breathe only for hope
or the illusion of it.
This poet wants the nests of all his verses
rooted on the boughs of a tree called eternity,
so he consecrated these verses like seraphims
by blessing them with agile wings to brave all storms.
O! heavens grant me the freedom
of unbridled thoughts, make me
a master of my desires,
make a slave for your holy course
out of me.
I dread the company of bones draped in varieties of skin tones,
I dread anything walking on two legs, anything
with a head pockmarked with two eyes white as boiled eggs,
anything with a mouth sculpted just almost underneath those eyes,
if not for the sovereignhood exercised by two crouching noses…
I dread anything & anything
that’s capable of love & patience.
For I know in the heart of my mind,
that in their callused hands,
nothing is safe: not love, not patience…
& everything is a weapon: even love,
even loyalty.
On this my brief sojourn here—earth —so far…
I have seen terrible things: a lover
—sadly my lover— weaponizing
her lover’s ivory dreams against him,
when she was simply done with him
and needed to dispose him
like a loaded trash can.
On Staggering Faith and Vague Miracles
Sometimes in the absence of seasoned innate joyful songs, we return with a staggering faith
to rooms teeming with the ghosts of our embalmed fears hoping to find them already evolved
into tiny little joys.
Sometimes, ridden with disbelief, we repel like pagans scorning holiness: the soothing thoughts
of unconsciously unearthing some grains of delight embedded underneath the foot of our blistered
deeds after having sought absolute remission, & whenever an angel perches on the arch of our
aching souls urging us to leap at an ecstatic pace into freedom, we muffle his prompting voice
with the blanket of disbelief.
Sometimes, miracles come to us draped in garments of disbelief. Sometimes all miracle wants
to make of us is a vessel equipped with an atom of faith, damned with a will to dare, to stump
at the staunch core of disbelief, hoping to stumble upon life in death.
Sometimes, the world closes all her windows on you, and like a naughty boy on probation you start
feeling trapped in the well of aloneness brimming with darkness, with the fierce faces of your fears. Sometimes, like you, fellow travelers, I do not know what to make out of the silky fabric of existence
and on days like that I often bequeath myself again like an estate to untainted love.
Abdulmueed Balogun Adewale is a black poet from Ibadan, Nigeria. A Pushcart prize and BOTN Nominee. He was longlisted for the 2021 Ebarcce Prize, shortlisted for the 2024 Gerald Kraak Prize, finalist 2021 Wingless Dreamers Book of Black Poetry Contest, won the 2021 Annual Kreative Diadem Poetry Contest & the 2024 Dr. Samuel Folorunsho Ibiyemi Poetry Prize. His poems have been published in: The Westchester Review, Soundings East Magazine, Poetry Lab Shanghai, Hawaii Pacific Review, ROOM, The Oakland Arts Review, Moonstone Arts Centre, Applause Literary Journal, Red Cedar Review and elsewhere. He tweets from: @AbdmueedA
Image: Arch-Angel Raphael the Artist, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
