THE UNTOLD PRAYERS OF A MAIDUGURIAN MALLAM (A POEM) by Abdulbaki A Ahmad

O the Just Judge, master of these semiconducting troglodytes,
O the master of cockroaches and rats, the maker of penises that’d
Only sleep in a cold, unripened hearth of immature girls
O the sculptor of death whose buttocks are blacker than the Haramist flag,
master of my mother’s gasp, the dexterous planner of her fragile eyes

O the maker of tears, the maker of tongues saying your zikr in a language of blood
For how long will we be eating our mothers,  drinking
the bones of our fathers for breakfast, for how long?
For how long will we be scrubbing our floors with littered faces of our wives,
their eyes gazing at us every time we drop our heads to doze, for how long?
For how long will we be looking onto the curvy buttocks of bombs, of underage
IDPs, their erect nipples glistening in sweat of unfounded god, for how long?
For how long will our poems echo with drowned voices of severed heads, their zapping tongues filled with tintinnabulation of divine bells, for how long?
For how long will we be helixes reciprocating these pistons
whirling the crankshaft of the incestuous engine of death, for how long?
For how long will our mothers be porn stars, legs stretched wide posing to the
bitter taste of hope peeping through the diaphanous tongue of death, for how long?

For how long will we be foreign in our homes, to the dialectal tongues of our Faith,
our tongues mining prayers we’ll never live to name,
prayers that’ll curse the image of their toes. ..

 

 

 

The Poet…

Abdulbaki A Ahmad is an undergraduate of Electrical Engineering at Kano University of Science and Technology, Wudil. He’s a technophile, budding poet, short-story writer and technical essayist whose works have being translated into German and French by Austrian Haiku Association. He’s a finalist of ‘I Found it Short Story Contest, 2018. He spends his leisure time weaving bearded transformers into wheezing words, reading research journals or literary books, learning foreign languages, watching movies or breaking hard carapaces of austere equations Boltzmann has left.

He tweets @AbdulbakiAhmad