Salah and I escaped
The blast that ate our mother
And turned our father
To the offering God punished
Eli's sons for eating
Looking for the safest tattered house to sleep:
I held Salah's hand, smiling
To him
As if what we lose is the leg of the goat our father rears
Before death
Everything in Syria will make you cry, so why not smile?
I know Allah hates oxymoron.
A bullet entered through Salah's forehead,
While we were fleeing from gunshots,
I smiled and took it from the back of his skull
& put it in my pocket
(I cannot carry a dead body with me &
I have to show the world I have a lineage
so that they will not say I fell from the sky)
My smile convinced the BBC journalist
(Just as I know, it is convincing God)
So, he came to me and asked me:
Journalist: before now, what do you want
to become?
Me: I want to be some mothers prayer
every morning they wake up to pray
for their children.
How to Love Like a Piano
I wonder why God did not create humans for
the same purpose Bartolommeo Cristofori built the piano:
to give pleasure without aches.
Like we go to the piano and play
the keys according to the tunes we like
and, later drop it after playing
to our satisfaction
and the keyboard does not complain.
We should be like the piano:
be useful and love people without expecting anything
in return.
About The Poet
Idowu Odeyemi is a poet and essayist. As a graduate in philosophy, he is interested
in engaging human existential issues - social, political, cultural, and philosophical-
and this shows in his writings. He is the winner of the 2019 Merak Magazine
(Liverpool, UK) Literary Recognition Award and Ekiti Future Prize for Literature.
He was shortlisted for the 2018 Nigerian Students Poetry Prize and Christopher
Okigbo Poetry Prize. He is a past-life contributor to Perhappened magazine, Barren
Magazine, Brittlepaper, Icefloepress, The Nation, Blue Marble Review, among others.
He is the current Managing Editor of Echelon Review, Onatrio, Canada.