Fate
Adeniyi Odukoya

Read by Odukoya Adeniyi
birds  fall into        penury  the city sells    to beckon   the gaze of god   father left mother      a gun & a wound         the gun untouchable    the wound her eyes   the wound her squint   the wound her death  the wound touchable in its reflect of delineation         her   words never betrayed      the ethics of lust     tenderness unhindered   breaking forth  into  a moon         hiding perfectly      inside the     hunt of an owl      a photographed horror  of love  stalking a venomous gazelle   saying feast upon this flesh                 a man will become   my grief     his dreams in reincarnated                    forms                   children  my         they say the wind   the millies of  its roar     are echoes    by the tears of widows      listening shards      stroked     light up   a candle  feet lay  into journeys    fitted into   creases   outlawed by   the   reckon  of  fate      they hide  her in a room        they call her a witch     the blonde tulip    holding the shell of a snail   the dark hallway   into  woe       they   wear  his name     in their teething brawls which means where does his death come from        ask   the keyhole   to say  where the light comes from                 in yoruba: Ni bo ni iku e ti wa                 rinse her scalp    into a calabash    ask her to call his name seven times over    a tied cork            I witness   from this                        unfolding      the   possession  of        greed                the miscreant misogyny     the    name   that episticides  a woman     into a man’s  finger -tiddling              at school a boy calls       love instead    of my name I point a knife at his eyes  chase him into my nightmare kill him in my dream   the next morning          I wear his skull    I wear his wrists      I wear his body   I choose to walk outside   of the sail of my mother’s fate  
  
Verse Block without columns

About the Poem

I wrote “Fate” in a sitting. It is one of those poems I didn’t go back to edit. The idea behind the poem didn’t come premeditated. While writing this poem, I stumbled upon what the poem is now. I discovered a purpose, a desire to tell the stories of women painfully ignored, molested and mistreated after the sudden loss of their husbands. In Nigeria, particularly in the Yoruba tribe, when a woman loses her husband, she could be burdened by his family to carry out some rituals in a bid to ascertain her innocence and non-involvement in the death of her husband. Though this cultural issue seems to be waning in this modern age, there are still widows subjected to this unfair treatment and many have become victims of an endless public jest. Towards the end of the poem, I capture the feelings of the girl child— an individual propelled by a drive to not go through her mother’s ordeals. In the coming years, I hope I’m able to make good poems about these matters.

Author Information

Odukoya Adeniyi is a Nigerian poet, essayist and freelance writer. He is the author of the poetry chapbook, Preserve This Light, published by PoetsInNigeria. His works have appeared in GlassPoetryThe Roadrunner Review, Palette Poetry and elsewhere.