In this poem, you will see bodies struggling on words, but the living don't understand the linguistic approach of the dead, but I guess they are foaming on a question again and again, why were we tried with genocide? As if we are guttering candle wax In this genocide, are boys bankrupt of their dreams, seeking solace in rotten memories Souls flew out their bodies like blood after a professional cut of a blade, and blood gushes out of the body, a testament of ruins We don't know how to message God To travel down here like a bird on message to sew the soul back to the body & command the sand to break ties with the blood / that the body may drink to life back the blood What is the crime of the little girls whose eyes are a mirror of a beautiful future and fortune? Left in the choice of choosing death by gun or by rape, this world still terrifies me
A Testament of Ruin
Ariyo Ahmad
3 Questions for Ariyo
What was your process for creating this work?
It's part of a writer's task to write on different levels, I mean either it springs from personal experiences, writing for the voice of the society, or set oneself on task to write on a particular theme or image. The first piece "Map of Survival" was written to meet the target of a call of submission by a magazine but wasn't a fit for them at the time; the piece "Map of Survival" was created to meet a target, portraying a message of survival through theory of a bird while at the brink of survival. The second poem is about my country, Nigeria, which was written after a plethora of news of killing.
What is the significance of the form/genre you chose for this work?
The significance of the work is to create a work with couplets that carries the message or that carries the reader through the journey described in the story one after the other, and it is one form that I love as it shatters the wing of complexity, and it's completed using enjambment.
What is the significance of this work to you?
The significance is that I'm able to pass the message of the world and the chaos or grief that lingers in the depth of human life which they keep battling every day without knowledge of whether or not there's end to all this trial, it passes the message of the dilemma and crises seen and unseen in the world and aimed to pass the message of people who are either alive but their voices were silenced and unheard and likewise about the dead who were killed unjustly without any retribution, it has been my major aim to speak through poetry for the less privileged and I'm able to do a bit of justice to that with the poems.
Ariyo Ahmad, Frontier XI, is a Nigerian poet from Ogun State, Nigeria. A Pushcart nominee, he has poems published on Lumiere Review, Kissing Dynamite, Shallow Tales Review, Sledgehammer, Icefloe Press, Native Skin and several others. Find him on Twitter @ahmad_akanni.