Tag: poetry
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Keep your way!
My son tried to carry an orange box bigger than himself today. I tried to help. He shoved my hands away, choosing to carry it alone. Until he couldn’t. He stopped trying, opting instead to sit right next to the box, fully content. Looking at him, I realized that I have been observing him wrongly.…
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Keep words!
Words are living. I am leaning on this every day. Their hold can be strong. Forcing you to dig deeper than the surface of what they seem. I am making sense of words these days. Making sense of all the ways they burn like fire, then blow like wind, touching everything until you become one…
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Keep experiencing your journey!
So long as the road experiences a journey, so long as that journey is rough or smooth, so long as it takes turns up or down, and goes through paths windy and narrow, those lighted and dark, with frogs leaping or children stomping, so long as every single thing happens on the road, darkness, light,…
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Keep holding!
Beyond the tears, beyond the sighs, beyond the frustrations born out of nothing, something, everything, there is a child, waiting to be seen, hoping to be heard, wishing to be held. See them, hear them, hold them. Something must yield. Your hope, your flesh, your future, dwells too in this child. Dwell in them. We…
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Keep being limitless like a rainbow!
He drew a rainbow. A rainbow for me. He drew it up to show that I was a good mom. A loving one too. A rainbow, for a mom, good and loving. This is the recent image from a boy who just a month ago drew himself laying beside a pool of blood. I stood…
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Keep witnessing.
When a woman dies, and her cervix is to blame, catapulting her from the prime of her life, to her grave, what remains as a witness to her life, her stories, her cervix, her silenced voice? Who will resuscitate a life cut down by cervix? As I watch my life story slowly change, with cervical…
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Keep simple things!
Nobody gave her anything. Not the one she loved. Not the ones that loved her. Not even the ones she confided in, all things great, all things small. And so she sailed through life. Not giving. Not laying it all down. Not showing how she endured and endured until her last breath when her cervix…
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Keep Ije Uwa!
I am learning everyday, life is short. Love life like air, like mango trees. Ije uwa. Only this matters. No matter how small, keep your story. Write it as a note, a song, a book, the wind, or the kernels of a sheri mango. For candles will blow, tears will fall, even mangos grow old…
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Keep saying Kedu to all the ancestors gone, like my Mama!
I talk to my late grandma, often, every Sunday in particular. Whenever I say my prayers after holy communion, I say hello to her. English was not her first language. So all her prayers were in pidgin English and Igbo back then. She mixed both languages often. My favorite being the one for Blessed Sacrament.…
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Keep being in service of others like moonrise!
I imagine a people can lose sight of their history. Become swept away by the current of other people’s history. Ignore too when the rain began to beat them that they forget to dry themselves up. All of this is grave. The loosing sight, being swept away and simply forgetting. But of all this, prescribing…
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Keep knowing where your voice belongs or all things Sheryl Lee Ralph!
“I am an endangered species. But I sing no victim song. I am a woman. I am an artist. And I know where my voice belongs… To anyone who has ever, ever had a dream and thought your dream, wasn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t come true. I am here to tell you that this is what believing…
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Keep the significance of grants like roots!
There is a part of a grant, more poignant to me these days. It’s the part that keeps me up every night. The part that keeps me restless. The part often hidden. The part that anchors me. The part too that absorbs everything and transports me to new heights. The part worthy of digging. The…
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Writing with Juliet Iwelunmor 