Hussain Ahmed, Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile

 

HOW TO PRAY FOR A BIRD IN FLIGHT

My baba teaches me to talk to God.
I fold my arms around my body
to show how cold I stand in a jellabiya.

I’ve had the same shadow for too long
and it does not hide me from the sun.

The gravediggers lower another girl into the earth.
We thank them [again] and we give sadaqah
and label the grave plate in bold letters.

My baba teaches me to pray for my dead sisters,
they survived the war and the curfew, but died

months after, in a labor room. I don’t keep dates of my losses
even though my stomach is cold enough to preserve my griefs.

I pray that a gazebo will not be made of my bones.
The scar on my leg is evidence that I was born a cartographer.

This is the closest I am to a bird, and maybe to God.

Award-winning Mississippi-based Nigerian poet, translator and environmentalist Hussain Ahmed’s full-length poetry debut is Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile (Boston MA: Black Ocean, 2022), a collection of first-person poems that explore “the role of silence in a time of war.” Writing out the tangibles and intangibles of memory, Ahmed’s lyrics float through the brutal lessons of a deeply personal history, offering a layering of storytelling song, and gestures heavy with narrative, offering the importance of stories told and retold, passed on to those who weren’t there. “Before the war,” he writes, to open the poem “HOW THE WAR MADE US A NAME,” “we had names we inherited / from the dead. They kept us warm / until we start to lose those names to the wind.” These are songs to be sung and repeated, and remembered, in part to offer what otherwise might truly be lost. “We dug the ground so many times,” he writes, to open the poem “AFTERMATH,” “burying a dead body or sowing a seed / both of which did not grow.” Through a documentary lyric, Ahmed offers a book-length poem of communication, loss, family and dislocation; of survival, and the details of war and its aftermath. As he writes as part of the poem “SATELLITE PHONE CALL TO THE TOURISTS IN THE / TRAIN STATION,” “How often do you dream of home when it begins to burn?” As he writes, hope can only begin to recover when the truth of the story is revealed, and retold. Only from there, can one truly begin.