Instructions for Building a Bridge
Begin
not with steel,
but with a question.
Ask the child
what the other side
looks like.
Ask the fisherman
how the current
learns every name.
Ask the woman
who crosses each morning
balancing fruit,
hope,
and tomorrow
on her head.
Measure
not only the river,
but the distance
between strangers.
Leave room
for birds
that refuse
to recognize borders.
Leave room
for silence,
because every honest conversation
must pause
long enough
to hear another heartbeat.
When the bridge is finished,
do not name it
after the richest donor
or the loudest speech.
Name it
after the first person
who crossed
without fear,
and the second
who turned back
to help someone else.
The Library of Borrowed Voices
My grandmother
never called herself a historian.
She simply remembered.
The names of rivers
before they were renamed.
The recipe
that survived three migrations.
The lullaby
that crossed a border
without a passport.
She shelved stories
inside ordinary afternoons,
between washing clothes
and slicing mangoes,
between power cuts
and the first drop of rain.
When she laughed,
entire generations
leaned closer.
When she fell silent,
the room understood
that forgetting
is the first language
of disappearance.
Now I write
because memory
is too heavy
for one heartbeat.
Each poem
is a borrowed shelf,
each line
an invitation
for tomorrow
to recognize
the voices
today refused to lose.
The Cartographer of Smoke
They hired me to map a country
that refused to remain still.
Every border lifted at dawn
like birds startled from a field.
Mountains traded names with rivers.
Cities folded themselves into pockets of fog.
Even the compass developed a conscience,
turning away from every certainty.
So I drew with charcoal.
Not because it lasts,
but because it remembers fire.
Each morning, the wind corrected my work,
crossing out kingdoms
with the patient hand of weather.
Each evening, I began again,
learning that failure is only another alphabet
waiting for a different mouth.
I met an old woman
carrying an empty basket.
She said,
“You cannot measure a place
by the roads that survive.
Measure it by the footsteps
that refuse to disappear.”
Then she walked into the horizon
as if distance were merely
another kind of doorway.
When my employers returned,
they asked for clean lines,
accurate distances,
a legend explaining every symbol.
I handed them a page of ash.
“This,” I said,
“is the only map
that tells the truth.
Everything living
keeps moving.”
Hassan Ismail Adekunle is a Nigerian poet whose work explores memory, family, place, resilience, and the quiet beauty of everyday life. His poems seek to uncover moments of grace and humanity within ordinary experience through clear, evocative language. His work has appeared in The New Verse News and Willy-Wash Webzine, among other literary publications. He continues to write from Nigeria, where he is at work on new poems.