Two Poems || Ridwan Fasasi

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OF A POET & HIS COUNTRY'S DOLOUR. 

Inspired by the recent shooting of protesters in Kenya 


It's a thing of tragedy to name this poem a beautiful thing. 

Pardon me, I am not trying to fuck with language. 


Everything I have named beauty is only a reminder of my 

grief: a garden of roses blooming its lushness of reds on 

my brother’s grave; the endless blue sky after it kisses 


a black horizon; the night before it lost its essence to the 

moon; the birds taking flight into the safety of the 

sky; men chanting peaceful songs, protesting against wounds 


that do not heal; our bodies walking into the mouth of 

guns, as if to say it would spare our innocence. Once, I 

wrote a poem about the brief history of erasure, 


about the sorrow of my sorrow, & titled it memory. 

But now I understand my country holds a lot of

sadness in its flesh. & It's not enough to qualify my 


portion of her sadness as a memory. Here, grief is like 

a wildfire—it torches what it touches & nestles on the 

branches of the body as a portraiture of beauty. 


A mouth is a wounded thing. By which i mean— 

once, a cyborg offered me metaphors to unwind its 

part of my country’s misery. & tonight, it is choked 


on language—shut down. Say to live we must close

the mouth of our grievance & pretend it's beautiful.


A PARADOX 

After the Lekki Tollgate Massacre, EndSarz, 20th October 2020 

it's a thing of terror to sing a song to the 

night. here, the mouth opens, enough to let 

silence crawl in. believe me when i said not 

every death is a door toward erasure. it is something 

you must fashion, whether against or within a 

body. today marks the 4th anniversary of the 

massacre at the lekki tollgate. twitter. #endsarz: 

the videos keeps replaying on my phone— 

how the night punctures holes into bodies. 

before the massacre, there's a boy holding a placard, 

as if to say, guns are not enough to steal innocence. 

& there's another, maybe another & another & 

the death continues. i am walking past the street 

again, & silence is all i hold in my throat. forgive me, 

i have become too human to name my death an 

escape. denouement: in my dream, my son is 

holding a placard up in the air. when asked why 

he chooses to protest. he says cheerfully, i was born 

to continue the death of my father, punching his 

chest heavily. in my head, i am replaying his words, 

wondering if anything has ever had a claim over 

me in that way. the body is never corrupted. a bullet 

won't kill you, it only opens a hole wide enough 

for silence to crawl into the body.





Fasasi Ridwan  (he/him), whose works have appeared/ are forthcoming on Eunoia Review, Lucent Dreaming , Afrihill Press, SprinNg, Kalahari Review, and elsewhere, is a Nigerian poet of Yoruba descent. He is a member of The Swan Collective. Find him on twitter (sorry X) @Ibn_Yushau44.


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