Just Adachi

If regret is a song, then let me answer it once, low and without feathers ruffled: I do not regret you. Even now. Even as your morning song tries to unwrite our mornings. You think your sorrow is a river— it is a mirror. You polish it each dawn to see yourself as someone who once loved and lost the right to. But love was never a right. It was a branch we both landed on. That row? It was not the fall. It was your pride refusing the landing. So sing your elegy to the empty field. I have already flown not away from you, but past the story you need me to live inside. You call it regret. I call it your ego wearing mourning clothes because it could not win a fight that never needed winning. I will not match you grief for grief. Instead, I will eat the same red berry under the same sun and remember us whole— not because I am blind, but because I am not afraid of the small, broken parts. Your regret is yours to carry. Mine would be a lie. And lying to make you comfortable is the one thing I ne...

My love,  they say the clouds are gathering for a protest and has said woe betide the uncovered skulls caught in it. The national grid has fallen on it knees again,  in despair or supplication,  I cannot tell. So I light the scented candles we saved from our last time together,  to watch the shadows grow, and think of you, and the last words you spoke. You said the mad men have started again,  and everyone watches with winter frosted  glasses. But darling, we are Aba-made; like the tinker,  we have learned to beat tin scraps into pans. I’ll tie my wrapper tighter, plant ugu and  cassava, and tell the hungry ghosts to wait a minute. My love is not a thing they’ll get their hands on. I see the men at the newspaper stands, the young ones salivating at the prospect of witnessing history they only read about; the old ones shaking their heads at them. I write the rising prices as prompts  for stories that will be told one day. My blue jerrycan is r...

The pen is heavy.  Heavier than the hoe I swung in the sun. Heavier than the basket of yams I carried down from the farm. Heavier than the baby who only chose to draw breath outside this world. This little stick of blue plastic, it has the weight of a grinding stone. My name is Uwalaka.  I am seventy-three seasons old. All my life, my mouth has been a locked box, and the key was swallowed by my father, then my husband. When I was a girl, I saw the moon split the sky in two, a silver gourd pouring light. I ran to my mother, my voice a small bird in my throat. “Mama, Mama, the moon has broken!” She pressed her hand, dry and cracked like old leather, over my lips. “Shhh, Uwa. A girl’s words are like smoke. They have no place in the air. Shut your mouth.” The bird in my throat learned to be silent.  It built a nest of stones. When I was a wife, I felt a pain like a hot coal in my belly, a different pain from the one that brought my children. I tried to tell my husband, his ba...

Panic grips the edge in a bid to climb up. Stoicism and optimism, frantically, try to pry off its fingers. Later, the quiet: panic skulking in the shadows.

I usually let my poems speak for themselves, but 'Becoming' requires a bridge between two worlds. When I first heard the relentless, labouring cadence of Rudyard Kipling’s Boots, I didn’t just hear soldiers marching; I heard the rhythmic thud of hoes against red earth and felt compelled to reimagine that cadence for a 16th-century Igbo maiden, a girl caught between her own fear and her role as a reluctant sacrifice to shield her village from raiders. This is the rhythm of her transformation from a daughter of the soil to Ala itself.

I want to cry, but you keep asking— What exactly are you crying for? Did you lose something? That is it. I do not know. But I do know I am crying for what should have stayed. I am crying for the hanging dreams I keep leaping to grab. I am crying for the unlikely strangers at the door, their mocking grins taunting me as I heave into the toilet bowl with all my heart, with no one holding my hair. And when you ask again, What exactly are you crying for? I know what it is: I cry because I am too heartbroken to fight off the disappointment and the shame.

The god of muse, here are my offerings offered in benediction, for through me flows your river of inspiration. Your eyes, my eyes; your mind, my catalogue. Here are my offerings  offered in thanksgiving  for that which was given me today. Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow shall meet me at your door step.

The full moon brought prayer to my lips I asked for mine to love and love for me. How I sighed in doubt as the clouds wrapped up the moon as if to hide it from me. But it wasn't so For it had taken my prayer and wrapped it and offered it to the moon in supplication. Now here you are A mist solidifying before my very eyes. Warm Kind Sweet All man All heart Offering your hand Offering your heart  Asking me to take the leap and fall with you. How can I say no when you're an answered prayer delivered in a cloudless night  Allowing me stargaze into your heart. I'm falling into you.

Decisions were made yesterday So her e we are in convergence Nameless to one another But united in a determination to see the day  through as decided yesterday

He sits beneath a withered flag, bones tired from promises he never kept. Once, he roared with pride, green and white stitched into his chest like hope. Now, his breath smells of condemned oil and rust, his face all darkened with soot,  eyes clouded by smoke from fires he lit himself. They call him " Fatherland" but what father forgets the taste of his children’s hunger? What father strikes his children for asking why the house leaks, then calls it discipline, calls it patriotism, calls it love? His palms are cracked from gripping too much power, his voice hoarse from endless speeches, the kind that promises rain and deliver drought. He tried to build cities and forgot their names, buried his daughters in promises of light, and taught his sons to kneel before thieves and call it respect. Now, at sixty-five, he mutters to himself in the dark, counting the ghosts of coups and rigged elections. His children look away, building rafts from his broken fences, sa...

The moon has turned its back on me, no longer a witness to the keening utterances I make. Last week, it kept vigil as I tossed and turned in bed. Yesterday, it watched me wander through sleep in search of you. But tonight it turns away, refusing the burden of my grief, no longer a witness to a soul reaching for another already in flight.

I can't stay. I wish there was an easy way to tell you. I can't stay. When I decided to leave, I cannot say  but on the day I cross the threshold I will leave behind a gore that will break you, a gore only you can feel. You will double in pain; you will shatter as you stare at the red streaks. Your heart will clench like a fist as you look back on our time together, what we ate what we drank. You will cry for me. But by that time I will be at the border, trying to cross over into the city of the has-been. Your pleas unreachable to my ears, your prayers muffled in padded cotton holding my shed skin. I couldn't stay. I wish I had a reason for you. We are back to square one. Perhaps we will choose each other again.

She reminds me of ancient trees, firmly rooted despite the punishment they receive. She who once held her world in her backyard learned that anticipation carries a deadline. One day it rains and her backyard sprouts. One day it stops and her backyard wilts. Anticipation has a deadline. And on that day, she did not lay out breakfast for the milk stopped getting delivered. She went instead to her backyard and uprooted the tree with twin stumps straddling the pond. “They drink more water than they deserve,” she said with a heavy sigh. “Shall we have breakfast tomorrow?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, “but not with milk.”