ILA Magazine
Where Culture Meets Creativity
Poetry Feature of Yahuza Abdulkadir
THIS PLACE
Wash my face,
not with soft waters,
but with colorful dust.
Wipe away every stain
of memory,
that reminds me of this place.
I do not know when
my body grew into ears,
listening to silent whispers
of a broken tree,
that lost its blue shades
to the summers in June.
When the sun sets
a day on my face,
it burns my lips, tongue
& intestines.
And I ran to drown my legs
in the thick waters of Lamurde,
promising to bring my mother
some fishes for lunch, but the fishes asked for my voice,
to swallow their broken limbs.
I see this place
wearing my grandfather's accent,
the wind carrying his voice,
the trees bleeding his name,
and the sands painting him
into a black ghost. LITTLE SPACE
I watched him describe
his poem with a portrait of loneliness,
asking too much from the space that
gives so little.
somewhere in Egypt,
dust carried his father's ashes,
spreading them inside the Nile.
his sister's forehead was the map,
where he traced the road to his destinies.
last night he went in search of her,
she told him not to cross the road,
because of this space his destinies
means nothing but a combination
of grief and loneliness.
last year, my mother washed
a stain of blood on his shirt,
but his body was not there to wear it.