A RIDE INTO THE PALETTE OF MEMORIES
After reading Ojo Olumide Emmanuel
Once upon a dream,
I journeyed through the history of me as a page.
Inside, there’s a whirlwind teaching a boy theories of hell.
There’s a naked hell glowing from bone-to-skin skin-to-ashes
& ashes into everything the fire named.
I bent down to morph the ashes into bowl of sand.
Suddenly, Dad’s picture emerged like dust on the pulpit of wind
With a broken image still blurring on the album.
In the album, his sins are mine,
the last duplicate of his sins winged through
my palms to sky. You see, this body
Has become a temple of forgiveness.
I forgive him. I do, I believe I do.
Outside the album, he’s vomiting all the apologies
Out of boredom.
Adamu Muhammad Ja’agi (AMJ D’POET) is a young Nigerian poet, debater, public speaker, and a spoken word artist from Minna, the center city of Niger state. Ja’agi is a young voice who is passionate about art and it’s magic at storytelling. He has represented the state including in a project presentation nationwide. Ja’agi is a student of father O’Connell Science college, Minna
Perhaps this is true for all poets, for all female poets who write with a captive urgency deep inside the abyss of the frozen sea and the wilderness of their heart, that there are dreams are wounds, that the image of the same gender parent is wound, the family album is a wound and childhood is a wound, and from these memories, from all of these wounds, poems rise like the phoenix to leave no trace of sadness or melancholia. Life will break you, as Louise Erdrich wrote, correct me if I’m wrong. There is a theology behind everything, even our wounds. The poet trusts this instinct, their journey, the trajectory of it, because in a sense when you are waiting for the poem to appear, you are also waiting for the hand of God to appear. In the end, pain turns into wisdom and experience. Sometimes, even a religious instruction, a spiritual discipline.
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
Rumi