The World Crawls Out Of His Mouth

Free Verse by Khadijah Abdullahi

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The words that dabbles out of a narrator’s mouth are pebbles
that lands where the heart is a home to hollow grief.
He does not grow folktales out of his mouth but carries
reality into a frame where days rupture into night
and how our breath breaks the universe into the wishes it gathered
beneath the splintered moonlight.

Dad always told us that our backs should be covered with our
own husk and our demeanor should embody the energy
that repeals that dark edges that grows on our soul.
He held our hands beneath the splintered moonlight,
a ritual to hold us tight into a sculpture molded into light.
It was perfect, or so I thought. But it was enough to hold us tight.

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Khadijah Abdullahi is an 18 years old poet and a student of law at the prestigious Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. She had her first lingual manuscript in Hausa titled Gonan Dabbobi shortlisted for the prize of Nigerian Prize for Indigenous writing, she is passionate about human rights. She participated in numbers of competitions within the Faculty.