Free Verse by Khadijah Abdullahi
The words that dabbles out of a narrator’s mouth are pebbles that lands where the heart is a home to hollow grief. He does not grow folktales out of his mouth but carries reality into a frame where days rupture into night and how our breath breaks the universe into the wishes it gathered beneath the splintered moonlight. Dad always told us that our backs should be covered with our own husk and our demeanor should embody the energy that repeals that dark edges that grows on our soul. He held our hands beneath the splintered moonlight, a ritual to hold us tight into a sculpture molded into light. It was perfect, or so I thought. But it was enough to hold us tight.
Khadijah Abdullahi is an 18-year-old poet and law student at the prestigious Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. She had her first lingual manuscript in Hausa, titled Gonan Dabbobi, shortlisted for the prize of Nigerian Prize for Indigenous Writing, she is passionate about human rights. She participated in a number of competitions within the Faculty.