In your sleep, you think your miserable life would finally cease and your age of sorrow would
glide into doom. When you discuss with the stranger in your dream, you wish life is endless
and the slippery concept of time, a myth. You feed your gloomy eyes with her smile, their sunny
rays whispering to your heart— there’s more to life than grief and agony. Her balmy voice drives
you down memory lane as you ponder on the past and the pains you’ve garnered as monuments
over the past few years from people who vowed to be blankets on cold nights but became winter
in their revered prime. In your dream, you see the legendary wall of solitude housing your soul
descend like rain and the ageless sky of gloom in your mind fade into oblivion and in replacement,
a blue river waters your parched throat, making you forget you ever thirsted love by drowning
the echoes of loss from your thoughts. You say, after the war, there are reasons to live,
to dream, to hope… maybe the soul of the world heard your silent night cries and the daylight woes
you conceal with faux smiles shall soon become forgotten songs in your aching skull.
You begin to shed your mind of forlorn and bid the sore-nourished past farewell,
when a heavy knock on the iron door of your frigid room, jolts you back into the cruel world
where people are no longer humans but thirsty beasts. You bark like a rabid dog for a minute,
before sodding the night for toying with your sanity.
Abdulmueed Balogun Adewale is a black poet and an undergrad at the University of Ibadan. He’s a Pushcart prize and BOTN Nominee. A 2021 HUES Foundation Scholar and a poetry editor at The Global Youth Review. He prays silently in his heart, that his verses outlive him. He was a finalist in the 2021 Wingless Dreamer Book of Black Poetry Contest, Winner 2021 Annual Kreative Diadem Poetry Contest. His poems have been published in: Brittle Paper, Soundings East Magazine, ROOM, Watershed Review, Decolonial Passage, Poetry Column-NND, The Westchester Review, The Oakland Arts Review, Subnivean Magazine, Short Vine and elsewhere. He tweets from: AbdmueedA