Saddiq Dzukogi is a Nigerian poet and assistant professor at Mississippi State University’s Department of English. He is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla, a highly-acclaimed poetry collection which has earned him the 2022 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the 2021 Julie Suk Award as a co-winner. The collection was also shortlisted for the $100,000 Nigeria Prize for Literature.
BAKANAMIYA (1)
Saddiq Dzukogi
This welcome begins the waning hour
of our worship.
Loneliness will ring like a long metal horn
in the heart of iskokai. I have seen you come.
Every object, every breathing thing, has a history.
Even though you do not see
spirits dancing—
they sway in the breeze that stirs your windows.
It is impossible to exist
outside of a story. Life is a loop.
We meet again, at Kofan Daura.
I was housed in the old and weary bones of Baba
Almajiri, his body possessed without the call,
without the hysteric dance of Inna.
From the eyes of his horse, I saw an oasis
of exhaustion. A frayed saddle dragging behind
in the sand. I humbled myself,
adorning my face with an aura of hunger
and stretching out
my hands. He could hear the noisy prayers of my bowl,
the rattling sound of a single cowrie,
pleading for alms.
He reached into his old Bedouin bag
and threw scraps of bread
into my calabash. His voice weak,
his eyes—inane with pain of many nights and days.
He pulled out his sword,
made by a pagan blacksmith in Dalla Hill,
and said, beggar,
this cannot kill my thirst.
I want to fill my gourd with the joy of water
and wet my horse
with the delight of spring.
Kusugu well, I whispered. Go!
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BAKANDAMIYA (2)
Saddiq Dzukogi
In Jangari, beyond sama na bakwai,
in the township of spirits, I woke up
to a drunken daylight. And strung songs of origin
into the coves of Black Rock, my saddle of power,
where rowdy spirits laughed and wailed
in a frisky dance. It all began
there,
when Babban Inna, womb of the universe, plunged her hands
into the moist embers of the primal flower,
shaping and molding it,
until, like limp butterflies,
our scenic bodies emerged
from the pupa of her infinite life.
With wringing fingers of rheum, she opened our eyes
and perfected us with every touch,
like stone under a master sculptor.
Babban Inna’s deific body nourished us
through youth. Sarki consumed the last of her—
the fury she tucked away, in her bosom.
Near a celestial creel of compost, we broke open
from the cocoon of her care and soared on the thralls
of ecstasy, our wings ablaze with light.
====
RING
Saddiq Dzukogi
I took a piece of chalk and drew a circle around my body.
In that ring, I engraved all the names of my loved ones
who are alive—until the only space left was under my feet.
Outside the circle, names of ones I lost.
We are eternal prey to the circle’s energy
looking to decongest its body from our own.
What I have is the beginning—in my hand,
it is what I can wield. Rubbing my palms on the ground
the white line of the circle became a mixture
of chalk and dirt on my skin—still the two worlds
stayed separated after my ritual collapsing their boundaries.
I unrolled my prayer mat on the melting snow,
sat facing a frozen lake, imagining the sun probing through
the ice, 4 inches thick. A man idling in the middle,
his machine drilling a wound in the solidified water,
ice fishing. I looked on, waiting for his hook
to find a trout. What if this is how death finds us—
by luring us with what we desire?