A Call for New Names by Amina Akinola
Amina Akinola, Frontiers VIII is a professional health personal and a product developer student at Google. She's a part-time writer and lover of arts. her works are published and forthcoming in South Florida Journal, Lagos Maroko Print Issue, Brittle Paper, Nigeria News Direct Poetry Column, Visual Verses, Asterlit Magazine, Ice Floe, and others. Her poems were shortlisted for the African-Arise Contest 2020. She is a member of the Hilltop creative art Foundation.
Author Foreword:
The "Sustainable Development Goals" Zero Hunger and No Poverty had set me out to write this piece for a solidarity contest, as a reflective piece on Nigerian children whose futures are at stake. The piece narrates mostly the effect of poverty and hunger on the growing Nigerian generation. It centered mostly on yearning for betterment, a call for the government to look back at the lower citizens. However, we all play a hand.
My origin traces back to whispers.
Scattered rose brambles and buds that cannot share their stories.
Today, I watched a lightning bug fly out the belly of a flower.
Shaken from its confines rooted in cement.
I ask: how long do we starve before it drains our souls?
In my country, everyone hauls a casket in their shoulders,
waiting to waste away with the passing of days.
My casket is full of skeletons — of children — wasted from hunger.
Bone-dry hands that yearn for rain.
In this world, we are all hungry — craving a different dish,
like the lads lurking around the lane of Okokomaiko.
In Agege, the children lack their namesake bread.
Men don't cry, here — they stare blankly into the sky with no tears left to flow.
At the market today, a girl attempted to steal garri for eba her body was shoved between hot grates barbecued. I ask again, who will account?
Who will fashion our future when our hands are fumbling to beat away the smoke?
Here poverty is a menace yet to be dismantled.
Here poverty has grown beyond the wings of charity, yet we can not clamp its cord.
Who will combat this chronic ailment that merges our nation to mortality?
I started yesterday by tucking some notes in a beggar's bowl,
I wished I could do more, but my pocket taunted and laughed at me.
How long do we plan to hem nairas in bowls?
When did our people’s hunger become invaluable?
Allah ba mu sa'a — rhythm on our lips
Poverty — e choke
Sama us beta empowerment, with a platform to manifest change.
Not one that leaves us to wander, & wonder, when will our savior arrive
Hope — is a thing that withers a man before his death.
No amount of given fish will quench a man's hunger
like the effect of hooks allotted to him to hunt.
man, I say: not fit to live off fish alone, e no fit
Give us the map to fair fates;
we yearn to rally our tongues — over a greener community;
we yearn— to bear new names.
