My aim was to dedicate this blog to talking about things that would promote the thriller genre that has been neglected by Nigerian authors. Poetry was not in the realm. But I stumbled over something that took my breath away immediately: a poem that had me thinking and wondering, and also inspired. I hardly read poetry. It’s one of the three forms of literature that I have avoided getting so close with. I love drama because of its great sense of humor. The truth is that I have had less to do with poetry because it took too much to understand it. Poems in literature were the toughest things to learn back in school. I wasn’t a great lover of the written word generally; I was dying to draw and paint. Drama tried to settle in around 1996 when I played Gbonka—the limping character and messenger to King Adetusa in Ola Rotimi’s classic The Gods Are Not to Blame—in a drama by our school drama club while I was in my final year in high school at Roots Nursery and Primary School, Yandev, Gboko. It was a wonderful performance which took place on stage and on location in a forest few meters away from the school. It was recorded on video but the sad thing about it until today is that we never saw that video. That was the first and so far, the last role I ever acted in a play.
Back to the poetry.
I was away in Zaria for work. After a hectic day of fieldwork, I was struggling with the compilation at night in my younger brother’s room. He had taken hold of my laptop and was so busy with it, typing with two fingers, I guess. Because when I saw what he had typed afterward, I knew he was that slow. But that was not what interested me; what grabbed me at once was the few words he had put down. I had not known him with writing poetry. I remember he had written a few songs. But he was so unserious with that so seen such intricate writing amazed me. It made me see poetry differently, as not that hard-as-nails piece of writing so nonrepresentational, but a thing of beauty and such of strong emotional intensity that makes us evaluate our lives, understand our being and reshape our standing. Before I leave you with a poem from this young man, Dese Baaki, I also want to quote him in a little writing he titled Imagination:
"Imagination brings about scrap ideas that eventually lead to a comprehensive manuscript. The funny thing about writing is that, it makes you start thinking. Once you’ve started the process, you can’t just stop. It makes you articulate too. It also makes you feel a sense of belonging to your own self, making you feel you are not alone; a buoyant feeling with no trouble at all, making you build confidence within yourself and comparing it with the mutual feeling of passion relating it to your work, which serves as an offspring. If you write and write every day, making it comprehensive or not, you begin to feel that your brain is like a well-preserved machine churning out things that will eventually prove to be of use to someone, somewhere, someday, sooner or later."
As a writer, I find this very true.
Now let’s listen to this prodigy, who has brought our attention back to why we live in this wonderful poem, titled: A Solitary Prayer.
A SOLITARY PRAYER by DESE BAAKI
When the wind blow,
And the rain fall,
The striking, thundering and lightning of the earth
Makes me feel hell.
The nervousness
Makes me think of the last day,
Which makes me feel there should have been
No birthday.
Premonition has dragged me
To an ominous feeling,
Making me feel morbid
That the world will end soon.
The sorrowful feeling and thought
For series of self questions
“Who will I be?”
“What will I be?”
And ultimately,
“Where will I be?”
Suddenly rushed into my heart
Then I bowed down my head,
And prayed.
Oh Lord God, where will I be, on the last day?
If the wind should blow every day,
If the striking, thundering and lightning of the earth
Should continue every day,
Then my prayer will be
A continuous process.
So, guys, who is saying his Solitary Prayer right now? If everyone would say a solitary prayer, we would not just worry about the last day, but we would worry about now.
