Voyager
the last time a boy writes himself into an hourglass of adventure, he scraps hopes and loss as a rephrased metaphor into his poem.
a boy is lost in the adventures of mispronouncing /a/ as /ea/, like the cracks and conjectures of pain on his throat, it carries the colloquialism of colonial partiality- this is what happens when a schwa is a synonym to misplacement of the tonality in do-mi-do.
this is how it feels to tie one’s lip to a white man’s mouth and our teeth mispronouncing the consonance in my assonance. he casts his tongue into the adventures of a boy sailing between the confluences of his mother tongue and remembers how he learns to recite ekun iyawo with
the joys on his lip. this is an adventure of a boy captured in between the fights
on his mouth, how his tongue is to learn how to read the tales of the whiteman’s dream.
this is where the history[ies] of his life are tied in between the masks on the jingling from the jailer’s keys.
this is where he learns to sketch his home as a queue at the country’s border, close to the moon, wedged between a foreign language/ where he listens to the epiphanies of burying his body alive into the sands of another man’s language.
Contributor’s Bio
Tajudeen Muadh Akanbi is a poet from Osogbo, Osun State, Nigeria. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in different literary press and platforms such as Afrihill Press, Kalahari Review, Spill Words, African Poetry magazine, and elsewhere.
