my god swears / by the fig, by olive, by the brightest star, by the prophet who penned no ghazal
we are mostly good at being alive / until there’s more dying to do than living
& suddenly, there are more birds in the sky than i can count
a woman drags a dead cat across a walkway & the streetlights strip into umbras
all the women in my hometown are good at burying lifeless things:
children & husbands — bulleted in their farms or hosed in a home raid by bandits
the meat seller swears he knows everything about death because someone he knows
has died in every day for two weeks. the thing is, we are mostly good at being alive
until there’s more dying to do than living. before dispersing to their houses
a group of men follow each salaam alaykum they push off the cliffs of their lips
with a warm stretched arm. in every handshake, i see an invitation to a janazah.
perhaps, being a witness to so much loss scratches away the living animal inside us.
i’m not prophesizing when i say by tomorrow, i’ll watch my people
gather around a motionless body, quiet as a stone — & fill the air with a chorused
innalillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un. which is to say‚ what i call death is only but
an opening in the back of someone’s chest. which is to say‚ i do not need
to write another poem mourning the demise of a brother i never knew
by name; never got to see, before his bones became filled with gunpowder.
on youtube, bearded men with rifles in hand, quote my prophet
to remind me of what he said a muslim is to another muslim.
i whisper the word brother & my throat asks me for every drop of water
in the Nile. at a party, a boy sings to me about bullets & blood, his voice,
heavy with the echoes of gunshots & i wonder, if there are angels
singing songs like this in heaven for all the people i’ve lost.
[This title is taken from Sarah Ghazal Ali’s “Ghazal Ghazal”]
Abu Bakr Sadiq is a Nigerian poet, studying at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He has work published/forthcoming in Lit Quarterly‚ Rockvale Review, Iskanchi Press & Magazine‚ Knight’s Library Magazine, The Muslim Write and elsewhere. Find him on twitter @bakronline
