Ode to the Boy I was at Genesis

my body still remembers the hand of God

Image: red rose petals against a white background. Photo by Mockaroon on Unsplash

i begin this poem in the name of Allah
who moulds souls into boys
within the womb of once-barren mothers.
my body still remembers the hand of God
pushing me head-first into the bowels of the night,
the cutting edge of the pain in my mother’s cries
as somewhere in a building that has seen many
breaths bloom into flowers, my father’s dua
becomes a melody.

God says ‘kum’ & my mother
performs the miracle of birth. joy beams
like the moon on her face as a child’s cry
breaks the silence of the night.

there’s only one time in the life of a child
when his cries morph into sweet music
to the ears of the world. in this story,
i am a nightingale flying through a heavy air
a white rose between my beaks, wrapped
in red silk, carrying the fragrance of joy.

in a version of this story, my father bathes
in a confetti of rose petals, his soul dancing
within his body. he opens his mouth
& a melody floats to the heavens like a balloon
filled with the abundance of praise.

in yet another version, my father rides home
from a war to another victory, to a house
where therein he left one person
to hear two hearts beating: mother & child.
he raises his flag and shouts: Fath’
& the child stops crying.

i write this poem as an ode to the boy i was
at genesis, to the womb that made me, to my father
who wore me a beautiful name, like a robe
on the seventh day.

Image: Timi Sanni stands facing the camera. He is wearing a white t-shirt with his arms by his side. His background (bushes, a wooden fence, and small building to the left of the frame) are blurred.

Timi Sanni is a Nigerian writer and Muslim literature advocate. His work appears or is forthcoming in Radical Art Review, Cypress, Down River Road, X-R-A-Y Literary, The Drinking Gourd , Ice Floe Press, Doubly Mad Journal, From the Farther Trees and others.

He is the winner of the SprinNG Poetry Contest 2020 and the Fitrah Review Short Story Prize 2020. He was nominated for the 2020 Young Writers and Creatives Award for Short Story/Flash Fiction. He is a recipient of both the NF2W Poetry and Fiction Scholarship. He is a reader for Liminal Transit Review and an editor at Kalopsia Literary. Find him on twitter @timisanni