IBANUJE

Narrator: 

In a certain town, thirty miles west from the city of gold and coral reef, the whispering night is a howling wind, rustling leaves, chirping insects, dark garment without sparkles.

    A woman under a thatched roof in her late 20s wears a dark linen of grief upon her neatly shaved head and oval shaped upright breasts. Her heart is crippled with undiluted sorrow, her tongue is without the quality of a lyrical note nor sprinkles of happiness as the lands of perdition have opened so many melancholy gates in her life. The radiant smile upon her face have become burnt offerings on pagan altars of blood as the music of her womb and heart have been stolen. She picks up her cold blanket that once held the colourful flowers in her garden to now harvest the river of tears flowing down her cloudy eyes unto her cold chubby cheeks.

   Her mind riggled through many rhetorical questions that murmur through her naked lips as to why there were so many deaths in this land than the sky could with hold.

 Woman:

Death , ikú ………

Why didn’t you steal from only the rich ? 

You’ve stolen from the penniless and left me on a pavement of shame and a mat of grief . You took away the ray of happiness and clouded me with anger and resentment. 

Ikú , you took him in his prime, you ripped him off his only cloth and clothed him with your six-feet garment . They call you the sacred deity that fears no one but the one that instills fear . 

Why does he have to be the one ??? 

You took but returned nothing , you are a selfish deity indeed . A coward that fears being forgotten, a coward that engulfs the righteous and leave the wicked . 

Ikú ,but why didn’t you leave the young ? 

Why did you rip them off in their prime ?

ÌKÙ:

Don't you know I am the tiger's teeth?

Don't you know I am the scarlet anger of fire?

Don't you know I am the darkness who eats the entrails of light?

Two moons ago, when I took off the flesh of Alabi's skin, your husband, it was sweeter than the laughter of moonlight children.

His brittle bones break effortlessly under the weight of my teeth and his heart, a milky cake covered with icing sugar.

And I will come again

I will sneak like a toothless shadow in night's skin and perch my feet on your threshold 

I will suckle the blood of your children's veins

I will undo the life of their rippling hearts

I will embitter the soups of your kitchen

I will break your body with sledgehammer of grief.

 Narrator:

And maybe someday in future, not tomorrow when the sun rises in the east, not the day after, not a fortnight after ; she would be covered in garments of dazzling smiles.

But for now, every day and night she would always remember the night when death made love to her, how he caressed her tender nipples,wrote his name on her ebony thighs as she chorused a psalm of moans,orchestrated a new line of strings in her heart and left her bed in a river of grief when the crescent moon shyed away as the golden sun took it's gentle place on it's throne in the sky.

She would then sit at the plains of Morrow to pour her sorrow. Once a vivacious sprightly woman with an effulgent destiny and ebullient life who stood tall like a giraffe. Now  spiritless, enervated, desultory and filled with a myriad of obstacles and dysphoria, redolence of forlorn hope and snowballed problems.

A mixture of helpless and hopeless. Death's tiger teeth had cut her off like a  rickety violin string ,she was a shadow, one without imprints. Her life had become an unending echo of doom yet hoping for peace and yearning for noise.

   So where would she go? To the right,where there is nothing left or to the left where there is nothing right?

She'd rather sit by the plain to reminisce her bleak past and future with so many memories not to be easily forgotten that she'll love to hate and have to love.

#theripper#

#lardeh#

#oluwakenning#

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Kehinde Adedeji is a young Nigerian poet and spoken word artist. He is the curator of PEARLS blog. At the moment, he's doing his degree programme in Linguistics at UNIBADAN. 

Johnpaul Ifeanyi (nom de plume - paulopalztheripper) is a young writer who hails from Delta state. He is the author of "UNITED IN GRIEF " and "EAST N WAIST" poetry collections .He has written many other poems and short prose poetry collections. Currently a final year student of medical biochemistry and a graduate of polymer and textile technology

Azeezat Alabi Omolade ( p.k.a Lardeh ) is a registered nurse but also driven by her passion towards writing , she is a compassionate reader and above all a good listener. She hails from the largest city in West Africa, Ibadan , Oyo State . She has written a lot of poems and featured in poems of other poets. She is the author of ‘Onítèmi (THE ONE FOR ME )’ and thus gave her the nickname Onítèmi.