The world is made up with the magnetic
touch of love
Where the two- gladness and pathos
Like the birth and death
A reaction in mind
We want or not
Flowers bloom and glorify the space
Enjoy the beauty of leaves and the sky
Fills the heart, a blissful joy
Beside the garden the cows and the goats
The lambs and the buffalos
We are the cowboys and the garden keepers
We build up civilization side by side but
When it burns the California Wildlife
People and animals rampages to save the
lives
Helpless life
When wind swells up the sea
Firing causes death
On the other side we stand before the
glass
In the dressing table
A mindset to love
See the birth
Just like the red crabs in Kuakata Sea
Beach early in the morning
Our eyes dancing in joy
Crying loud and deep to see the lives
passing away
Just at the time of rising the sun.
Chapainawabganj,
Bangladesh
14/01/2019
Feeling
The more it warms outside
The more it cools inside
Because it loses all the power
To move an inch
It’s my burning body
It’s my burning heart
Switching on the AC
Get back my heart
Wrap up my limbs
With you
In a body
Nothing to hide
After a blissful fight
Spent the cool, full of oxygen night.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
24/05/2019
Crying Deep
I have already lost my sense
Whether you talk with me or turn back
I cry myself within deep
O my love
I would not like to be without you
But I am in dead of mind
Lie aside
Would you please hold my hand
And embrace with a sigh
And the water filtered
And I can flow or fly….
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
24/05/2019
On The Auspicious Moment of Eid
When we taste the foods one after another on the Eid
morning
The hands of them spread for beg yet
Beg for alms
I say and can’t find out the meaning of the hands
Hanging in the air
The hands should rise in
soft to the Almighty
For all peace and happiness
O my dear, you are invited
Come and sit by me
Let’s enjoy the moments in full merriment
Stop for a while to make the day holy and joyous.
“And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing; a local habitation and a name.”
William Shakespeare
Blood Will Call is a beautiful book that promises the planting of the seasons faded out with the elegant winter, complex, and complicated summer, spring, and autumns, escapism, hurting, and wounded lives.
People who have to take stock of the exit route out. There’s abuse, there’s mediocrity, there’s average, there’s people living on the edge, addicted to the void of waiting, the darkness of existentialism, the apron strings of the kitchen, the reincarnation of ghost, illusion, and apparition. Don’t think of me as volcano, the woman seems to say, the girl child, clouds wherever they fix their eyes. There is legacy.
But there are also proponents for change, grief-stricken hearts, impoverished, disadvantaged, and marginalized circumstances. There is forgiveness, tenderness, vertigo, karmic accounts, and debts that have to be paid, and the analysis of scandal, and love story. Rituals of innocence, and wisdom to keep them company. I always wonder about the writer’s routine. Just the thought of this writer hurt me.
I thought of the writer’s anguish, in much the same way I thought of all the characters in the book, their anguish. It played a major role for me. Then came their sadness in a supporting role. Is the writer a morning person, an afternoon person, or an evening person? Do they write into the lonely hours of early morning? What was the object of the writer’s affection, the subjects they framed so imaginatively?
For not the first time in my life, when it came to reviewing a book, I ran away. I danced away from the writer’s vision for his book. This book was a crazy love, and the people in this book didn’t often obey the laws of human nature, or the rules of the game, or know when to say please, or thank you. This book was a boat journey into fire, a river of fire, the flames licking at the canvas of my bare feet. Invoking me to stay.
It was a crossing into the divide of sleeping and dreaming, thought and meditation, prayer and vision. You see the writer’s mind at work, a filmmaker’s vision, a poet’s meditation, a short story writer dreaming away. So, the book is acrobatic, intense, hectic, and there’s conflict, and drama that never leaves the page, but you get taken from point to principle, from one identity crisis to the next.
The women have an uninhibited desire for courage, savvy, sass, even when they are at their most vulnerable. They are armed with intuition, persuasion, greatness, supernatural memory, and desire. I paid critical attention to these women, these mothers with their large haunting eyes. They’re not party people, they’re not beach people. They’re people who go off to war every day of their lives.
Yet, there’s something beautiful about them. In their pain, their humiliation, the drudgery of their lives, they take you from the beginning of this book of short stories to the end, and you are wanting them to overcome their circumstances through any means necessary. And I think to myself, this is a Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri writing here. What now of the valley we’re in.
We’re dreaming that our books, our pen, our sword if you will, will hit the mark, will hit the ground running, and there’s the belief that our books will fascinate audiences, and we dream as Africans from the east to the west in poetry. We write our novels, and short stories in poetry. We envision that now is the time for that. The plausible time for the possible, and impossible, the time for Africans not to be soft targets.
It is difficult for African novelists, and short story writers to publish their books. The world has gone gaga over Nigerian female writers, but where are the male writers. They’re there. It’s just that favor, and increase has yet to work for them in the same way that it has for someone like Chimamanda Adichie. Sola Osofisan, I don’t think that you really understand what you’ve done. You’ve changed everything. I see Africa on the screen of my mind. I see Nigeria on the screen of my mind.
The writer taught me that God will put entities in your path either to obstruct you, destroy you, sabotage you, or uplift, empower you, and make you selfless, giving, gifted visionary. The book is a journey. The book is a spiritual journey. Sola Osofisan has a destiny, a kingdom, and in these pages, I took a knowledge from, lessons from my father, stories from my mother. There’s personal fulfillment here on these pages.
There were chapters from my childhood. Things I didn’t want to remember, but I remembered the lesson. Don’t waste the pain. Kill your enemies with kindness. Things happen in life. Things happen in Africa. Mostly negative things happen to women, and girl children in Africa. But they wake up in the morning, the country is still there. There’s a truly wonderful feeling in the air for me right now. Sola Osofisan is Herculean, an Aristotle-in-the-making.
Anybody who writes is creative, but few writers, creatives are historians, researchers, perfect illustrators at interpreting the past injustices of their country. I don’t need the world to love me after eight books. I have the same message for Sola Osofisan. Go on, comrade. Don’t quit, compatriot. Write as if you are living on the edge of the world, as if it’s the end times. Don’t give up your passion.
I’ve discovered the African Renaissance in Sola Osofisan, his brave world, his artistry, his flawless writing, profound technique, and style, and there’s chaos, hysteria, spiritual sensitivity that he brings to his writing. It is dazzling, and sure, hectic and pure, as he describes the landscape of life. Of what matters, mapping it all out for the reader, and it seems as if I have waited forever to read a book like this. There’s conditioned thinking, church, indoctrinated religion, theologians that are still there.
From the first page the characters hover in plain sight like the music of the night. They are anointed, and enigmatic (nurturers, caretakers, products of neo-colonialism that awaken others to insight, loneliness, curbing their enthusiasm for the disgruntled, the downtrodden, miserable pain of their lives). There is something frightening about the reality and non-reality of these stories.
How these people are blessed by their enemies even. The stories are filled with movement like dance, moving rhetoric that represents the unseen system, and a country that is as captivating as a symphony orchestra. I think of the aspects of almost prophetic vision that the people in these stories have. Forgive them. Forgive Sola Osofisan for taking you there. When you’re exhausted, take a break, inhale the aromas of the food cooking on the fire, exhale the happy days that these people will never have.
You just know that you are in the hands of a master-storyteller. More than imprint burned on brain, more like a ghost. I miss you more than most on some days, just thinking of the very thought of you. The book came to me in blooming flowers, in energetic silhouettes, in evolving waves, in vibrations, marking its intelligence in rotation in fulltime observation, great expectations of greatness in study.
Yes, the awareness of something evil is also out there asking for the taking. We live our lives in denial. That denial has become a pastime whenever we are figuring out the hurting in our lives, who was involved with the hurt, why’d it has to impact us so, hit us so hard. I love this writer who displays in one heart the fugitive spirit of humanity, in one soul survival and endurance, and fear and anxiety in the rural wilderness of the countryside in Africa. This is not an African book by far. It is a Nigerian book.
Nigerian creatives are using every story that they’ve heard from childhood, that has doors that lead to intimacy and frustration, that navigate you towards health, and homesickness, a basket case, and the decay found in the wild. Camp out in ‘Blood Will Call’ but don’t get too comfortable. Soon a force-field will hit you. The man you don’t want to marry, risk, adventure, and radiance. You can never predict the direction in which this writer goes. It is not the weather.
This writer eats the crumbs from our masters’ table, the dust of the colonial masters’ until it feels like home, with his angel tongue. I am a writer who understands the anatomy of loneliness, and the explicit, controversial, seed-language of blood. The book will grant you a revolutionary kiss on the lips, it is intellectual-magic, on so many levels political, breaking and un-breaking diplomacy, negotiation, and reconciliation.
Now a few words about Sola Osofisan, the writer of Blood Will Call. In Africa, in tales of folklore, in the tradition, culture, background, heritage of oral storytelling, passing stories from one generation to the next, there is always a woman involved. Now we have a man. Not just any man. We have a maverick-extraordinaire who knows when to make a gracious exit in-and-out of these relationships. He’s conscientizing an entire generation.
The Girl From Copenhagen by Glenn Peterson is a memoir of his mother, Inge. This memoir is very interesting and is a first hand account of when Hitler occupied Denmark and her life during WWII. She was born and grew up on her father’s farm in Denmark along with her siblings. She went to nursing school but had to give up her nursing career when she began experiencing severe edema in her ankles. She then went on to become a bookkeeper at the largest ship builder in Denmark. She met Bob Peterson at a dance in Copenhagen. After only a short time she left her life in Denmark and set off to America to marry Bob Peterson. This is the story of a small family living frugally, but very happy. This memoir will keep the reader interested from the first to the last page. I personally, found her account of life during WWII extremely interesting. This would be a perfect gift for someone you know who loves historical books or for your own home library.
SeaCity Rising by Elika Ansari is a wonderfully, delightful book about the lives of sea creatures that live in a pond in a city called Sea City. An old turtle is the King who has a daughter named Princess Dolores and also raising his niece Lenore. Babak is a timid little frog, the only one in the pond. Dr. Goldberg is a goldfish and a genius that is always inventing all kinds of things. One day Babak takes a walk and walks a bit too far to the Dark End, the SeaCity dump. He finds a piece of paper with a dire warning written on it. Some of it is written in Dot, the language of the water Deities. Babak decides he should take it straight to the King. The King decides that he should send someone to look for the Old Woman beyond the sea for answers. Since most of the SeaCitians cannot live on dry land Lenore, Babak and Dr. Goldberg, the goldfish is selected. Dr, Goldberg invents a kind of bowl that allows him to move about on dry land. While they rest, Babak discovers Princess Dolores has come along to be with Lenore. They meet many delightful land creatures on their adventure. This is not only a cute book for children but also contains a message of the importance of taking care of the earth and forests. Young children and elementary age will enjoy the story of these sea creatures and their adventures. I absolutely loved it.
This book is a fantasy filled with more twists and turns that will really keep the reader on their toes. When you think you have it figured out another twist pops up to keep you intrigued and wanting more. The Spitting Post is about an insurance adjuster named Vincent Carpenter whose ten year marriage has crumbled. When his wife takes off to meet her lover, he decides to follow her. A car careens out of control coming at him. When he comes to, he does not remember his name or what has happened. He finds himself in a bizarre place. Then his nightmarish journey begins. He comes across a beautiful woman he knows as the Green Maiden. Then in order to find her he must go through terrors and nightmares to try to reach her. If you love bizarre fantasies that will intrigue your imagination and keep you guessing. This is the book for you. I loved it and found it hard to put down until the end.
The Dirt Girl by Jodi Dee is a lovely story with bright beautiful illustrations that young children will love. It is about a young girl named Zafera that is quite different than the other children in her school. She wears twigs, flowers and leaves in her hair. She loves to play with bugs and insects. When the other children make fun of her, she does not understand so she smiles sweetly back at them. Then one day she brings to school homemade invitations to her home. The others accept out of curiosity and are very surprised that her home is beautiful and made into the side of a hill. Everything is natural in her home. The children love it so much they all want to be like Zafera. This is a beautiful story about how its okay to be different and be yourself. It teaches children how wonderful everyone is in their own way and how everyone matters.
This is a wonderful story about the journey of a child’s jacket. The illustrations are unique in that they are in black and white except for the bright green jacket. A little boy receives the jacket as a present. It is his lucky jacket. Then one day he outgrows it. His mother donates it so another child can wear and love the jacket just as much. This is a great book that teaches children about the importance of recycling. It teaches children the importance of giving clothes to others that we no longer wear. Children will delight in the story and love the illustrations.
I have a wall, and I shall paint it with all the colors of freedom and of friendship and trust. This wall shall be a lasting testament to the eternal power and magic of love.
I have a wall and it will be covered with images of windows filled with beauty and doorways of all sizes that open to gardens and cities and rolling hills filled with earth’s rich bounty, given to all.
This wall shall come from my heart and faeries shall sit lightly on mushrooms and beckon weary travelers to rest a while under shady trees and by laughing brooks filled with trout.
The foundation of this wall shall be wonder, its stones and mortar the quintessence of every shared delight, and running in eternal spirals it shall be crowned o’er top with the radiance of glory and truth and loving kindness.
Keys to the doors will grow like flowers on both sides of this wall, and every person who approaches with any need, or feelings of pain, fear, or defeat shall be uplifted and fulfilled by attaining its presence.
This wall-of-the-heart joins, not separates. This wall rises as testament and monument to the bonds that free rather than shackle. This wall is built by approaching with clear eye the difficulties and differences that seem to drive us apart but that, when touched by the delicate, sure hand of the Artist, reveal our deepest humanity.
Fish, a foot long, tail Forked, that dot a sign: Horn, will work alone to hurt Instinct no bar to boy with pole. He’s daydreaming on the bank, His shadow a most elemental thing More than his room at home A strike might prove no brain. More than skin allows the hands He worries about the size of something To annoy the threshing out of the marsh The train-whistle never tells him more. What aura the fins experience, The lightest finger on the line, Lead-line of fairest less or more Than one fisherman might stand. Quietude’s an elucidation of detail: One long flail of bones, needle-sharp, Deep inside something a good deal more Than gills (must grab them behind). If it bites it swallows bait and hook. A towel won’t work to uplift the headline: Boy cannot use tweezers or pliers. All hands and eyes, he stays faithful. To create, he says, living is possible. The table’s set without modifications. In his heart the channel makes its bed. The boy sees flicks of the invisible, Even as he cuts his cat behind the gills So that he can pull the skin toward the tail, Down with the pliers the way a sock Tends to slide away from the heel. The head he tosses into the hedge. Catastrophe purrs and dances with bees For a mouth full of whiskers and eyes Glazed with nature’s gifts in progress.
BLISTERED
Words! Get on, involved in particulars! Throw that pallet down in the sand and wait! Enjoyment’s identity burns pigment. The girls pass me by for long sleeves, a cap. Watch the red fox and possum prance and shine, Unselfconscious as I would like to be. Learning’s variation becomes some rules. Words may be true as very rotten wood. There may be deep streams in your complexion. There may be light darkness, like poetry. Frightening, to be in the sun too long, Fair-skinned, red haired, freckle-faced, pearly brown. Without a lesson-plan, go for the pier. Lie down under it: hard at seventeen. Body hard, muscles swelling – jumping round, The Charles Atlas course, come-on, one mag ad. Hype charges on before us, though I am The one blistering in the hot, beach sun. Two books in the plankhouse I was born in, Sears Catalogue and the Holy Bible. Peeled skin is the life of apprenticeship.
LIBBY CAMPBELL
Libby Campbell’s a wonderland In and of herself, her tutelage Bringing currents warm to Cool Spring Elementary Because she believes in helping Young people, third-graders, especially.
County Iredell’s vibrant with words And promise when Libby promotes and Manages the hunger every soul finds in Poetry: consider her love of children. Behold, she volunteers to help them Easily as she creates an atmosphere, Leading them to orchestrate their writings for assisted-living residents, Letting them appreciate the need to remember and create.
INDEPENDENCE
You raggedy flag of July’s minions, Come higher from the dirt and let waving Be holiday you salute with plenty Of hats of straw and maids and men merry. Let bells ring echoes over the cow-barn At the Tink and Addie Coats Estate set Aside this day for things windy and warm, The Boy Scouts pulling ropes to raise their sweat Upward the bells many timed tones downward From full force to the hidden, yet still found Once more on every summit and sound toward The sky all the way, the stars, stripes around, The twinkles rankling up unbottled heat Nights fill with rockets showering The Milky Way with swats On the way to what heavens rise and bear Fruit and, at last, support discord’s absence, When light shines on Dame Hymen’s tight lips To lap and lamp every Tuesday morn, When I was a boy, before dreams took me Asleep or awake and left me in bounteous Recall of wrong numbers and poverty And wilt in hills becoming mountainous, Desire lounging big in weather’s bounty, Rules, too, searing how not to burn biscuits Lovers miss while singing songs of sunshine. Bring on the brainstorm, then, babe, and remove The high chair for crowds to lean and pitch in To tie a ribbon round the old oak, one Of rainbow’s hues for July, slave girl’s few Years as full person instead of three-fifths. Let zippity spout without gagging On popcorn and beer while boys play nifty Stobs at horseshoes, one throw, success tilling Real veins in a town hurting to be born, Taken over by ones in time seeking The school for shelter and some unforlorn Adults on crutches imbibing as chiefs Mark and swing inside their heads for the score.
LOVE WORKS
There, summer briars sample air hotter than visitors Can stand. Buried in the cooler ground Lies our July. The blistering Sun sings along with children, hey-diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle – fond Of time they do not understand. There is no moral. Art is not all nursery rhyme, but a sorrowful Beauty in atmospheres sharp as a razor. No one comes to mourn what history sent Bullying its way to bring the slaves here. Great-great-grandpap George got caught up in what to do, then went Along with the laws. Maybe he was that rare Master who was good to a fault; how will I ever know The thicket ahead of my mower now Will spare more than stones and lichen-etchings. What belies the bellies in their cramped graves? Rats, the prowling cat, the waves The sun slants in salty smears to brave August on? Today’s news fishes for days When my country will put its money for the right And leave economics under the starry night To long for clear and obvious love. Leave July to sleep with her family. Let the possum trail for love as it plays dead. It needs no mere recognition as North America’s one native marsupial. Its holdings span country and suburbs, Where the fox and coyote, too, make their dens For all to see now and then To aid Love’s contrast, Hate, toward extinction.
This is part of an eleven-segment relationship advice column from Nigerian author and Christian motivational speaker Chimezie Ihekuna, where he identifies and debunks certain beliefs he disagrees with on the topics of relationships, marriage and sexuality.
Chimezie Ihekuna
Deception 10
I’ll become sexually faithful when the right man or woman comes
By deduction, you are presently exploring your sexual prowess with
different individuals. In other words,
you are obviously an infidel. Sexually, are you going to be faithful to your
Mr. or Mrs. Right in the making? Time will reveal the answer.
In fact, the issue of Mr. or Mrs. Right is being approached by
young men and women by a vague selection of ladies and men they have slept
with. In other words, people choose the
ones they intend spending the rest of their lives with on the grounds of sexual
interaction-probably on the best of competent individuals they have slept
with. We must, in concrete terms, based
on this context, define the terms “Mr. right”. Mr. Right is that man who
practically believes in chastity and self-control instead of promiscuity while
Mrs. Right is the woman who demonstrates a chaste disposition and is never
willing to let go of her body to gratify her admirers’ flirtatious desires in
the name of a deceptive life-long union.
Given those definitions, it is anticipated that individuals
portray a chaste attitude rather than sexually around while awaiting their
so-called Mr. and Mrs. Rights. As an employer, the vacancies you place on bill
boards, newspapers and other media outfits
job offers instructing interested
applicants or prospective employees to come with necessary requirements for
interested applicants because you have what it takes to fully employ their
services. Similarly in wanting to get a
chaste woman or a man with self-control, it is expected of you to be self-controlling
or chaste. Unfortunately, it is the other way round- people want chaste woman
or men of great self-control without possessing these qualities.
If you influence people with promiscuity, how you do intend
getting your Mr. or Mrs. Right? You are like the employer not having what it
takes to be one. In the first place, what makes you think that your right man
or woman will come to you, given your not- chaste behavior?
When do you think your Mr. or Mrs. Right will come? Do you think
the people you slept with are not the so called Mr. or Mrs. Rights?
To an extent, people who are sexually unfaithful have unknowingly
be seen as sex objects. Hence, they become “used and dumped” by their partners.
Simply, they are “replaced” by other believed-to-be-better individuals by
breaking up or demise, separation and even divorce. Eventually, these imbalances become eminent.
Don’t you think it is more upright to be chaste and self-controlling,
preparing you for your Mr. or Mrs. Right than depriving people their sexual
worth by displaying promiscuity, vaguely pointing the possibility of meeting
your Mr. or Mrs. Right, denying people the worth of chastity and respect?
