For The Sunday Muse prompt #122: ** We have carried our bodies to a far country, the weight of the burden of the duty of sons driving us like a ship heave-hoing in a stormy gale to the place where our kin were brought before. Each day we toil amongst the living to save the […]
For Day 27, the prompt is to write a poem in the form of a review of something not normally reviewed such as a mother-in-law, the moon, or the year 2020…I went for me, the prodigal in need of forgiveness 🙂 *** Offends seventy times seven times but returns for forgiveness. Me
Photo by Josiel Miranda from Pexels, for The Sunday Muse prompt #53 *** You have wandered through the wilds, labouring in the shadows of seven hills through caverns carved by seven rivers to a far place, a distant country. Hurtful words tossed into the wind hang like a broken shroud flapping in the wind, heavy with intention, […]
Image: Rembrandt, The Return of the Prodigal Son (Source) — I trace the beginnings of my faith journey to Easter of 1992, the enduring image of the day being standing alongside forty or so other people at the front of the bare, minimally decorated assembly hall of the College of Education Ekiadolor. I was there because […]
Amidst the rolling, changing landscape that is my recollection of growing up, two things remain as immutable constants; the university communities I spent most of my growing years till turning seventeen and churches— searching, attending, serving in, and leaving them. In my first memories of church, my father and I are in Benin City, at […]
Long before I segued into the way of all flesh, I had always had a sense of connection with the Prodigal Son. In these dark days when my faith vacillates between the highs of unquestioning belief and the depths of blatant scepticism with the increasingly longer spells of being mired in the drudgery of self […]
Photo by Jeff Sheldon on Unsplash ** For all my flirtation with being prodigal, I have never quite managed to untether myself from the Pentecostal faith tradition, especially the hand-clapping, foot-stomping, tongue-blasting, frenzied version that is your typical Nigerian church. There have been times I have felt right at home in a subset of it […]
I have now been out here for just over eighty days, days which have sometimes felt like they have been punctuated by starts and stops. There were the two weeks of self-quarantining in which nothing seemed to happen, then a two day week occasioned by the Eid al-Adha holidays, and most recently a three day […]
The less common variant of the “Where are you from” question I get comes from the unconventional way my surname is spelt. Family folklore suggests that my great-grandfather, whether in a fit of pique or an attempt to be contrarian – no one is certain which it is, took his rather mundane Yoruba name, replaced […]
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash ** It was my birthday the other day, and in keeping with what is becoming a tradition of sorts, I spent the morning wading through a flurry of WhatsApp and text messages before a fairly lengthy video call with the niece who I almost share a birthday with. The […]
