Dami Ajayi
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Tag Archive for: Brunel Poetry Prize

Tuesday Poem by Theresa Lola

3 July 2018/in Tuesday Poetry

We Rebuke This Bad Death

Dami is dead.
A rope was found clinging to his neck.
We think it was a halo failed by gravity.

Is he from our tribe?
Our language has no translation for ‘suicide’.
Someone in the village must have orchestrated voodoo.

Should we drench our bodies with anointing oil
so when the spirit of death tries to enter
it will drown like Egyptians in the Red Sea.

During interrogation, his wife swears her hands are clean,
claims he had been having money issues.
She uses the word ‘depression’ and our breaths sink.

The Yoruba proverb goes “Kì í sunkún a-nìkàn-para- è”.
A man who leaves his children to inherit disgrace
does not deserve weeping.

Should he have waited till old age to die a good death?
His mother named him Oluwadamisi; God spares me.
How could he rebuke his own name?

A mother does not bury a child she raised
without feeling like she is disturbing the ground
with her failure.

Who is paying for the funeral?
Should we bury him with the rope around his neck
and hope it turns into a halo?

https://damiajayi.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/scan0094-e1512417937317.jpg 876 600 Dami Ajayi https://damiajayi.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Dami-Ajayi-Logo-WT.png Dami Ajayi2018-07-03 06:10:192018-07-03 06:10:19Tuesday Poem by Theresa Lola

Guest Poem: Lapidary Verse by Peter Akinlabi

10 March 2015/in Tuesday Poetry

Princess--Jums-.jpg
Kofi Awoonor

he had contemplated the spirit’s final notation on the
performative self, visualising the vista of propitiation,
the body of winds that presaged the third and longest answer.
an acolyte of draped voices, he knew which hidden word
preceded a mask’s ascendancy, which indigenous bangle
death wore to a dance of dusks. he remembered to prepare
the body, a purest poem, to meet the spirit half-way to the
migrant moon.

Emily Dickinson

here, a poem resists its darkening, bursts rapturous into light
from a portmanteau; hesitant hands duly bronzed with the weight
of stealth measures insurrection of silence, the genie perfected to transgress
the art of twining. this is act insisting on its double, for shifted
as you had, the flint still glowed to glimpse the other end of conviction,
marshalling the sailor’s faith in the clairvoyance of the needle.

Ogundare Foyanmun

goat-black, your face recalls the wisp of itakun. time-travelled cube
of oguso must welcome you home. let’s lend thunder a sonorous voice,
iron a lyrical fist. let the leg that wields god’s grant conquer the other in dance,
and the maimed one lead the way like Afose, a word aimed at stars.
let the equally bad eye take its turn at the recovery of gods’ lost language.
it is so much blemishes like this that humanise the face of a god.

Amy Winehouse

you would not savour the unjagged peace of solitude,
or the quieter strain of being called out to. home would
grow in suffusion of the presence, beyond aerobic lashes,
striking the vertiginous pose between art and the landscape
of self. and all that is beautiful would interstice between
a worship and a warship.

____________

Peter Akinlabi was shortlisted for the inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize. The above poem is from his forthcoming collection, Iconography.

https://damiajayi.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/princess-ee9c9a-jums-ee9c9a.jpg 253 300 Dami Ajayi https://damiajayi.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Dami-Ajayi-Logo-WT.png Dami Ajayi2015-03-10 06:04:192015-03-10 06:04:19Guest Poem: Lapidary Verse by Peter Akinlabi

Dami Ajayi

DAMI AJAYI

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Dami Ajayi finds a way to fuse being a writer into his busy doctor schedule. Known as Jolly Papa (JP for short) by his friends—a sobriquet he took from a song by Rex Lawson—the poet cum doctor cum music critic makes seamless transitions between these orbits around which his life rotates.

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