In this poem, I do not want to hide my country’s failure between metaphors.
I will try not to robe the dirt off my people’s skin.
I no longer want to sing prayers into a dead thing.
You see, my country is no haven.
The gods have languaged their lips into ” Let there be night here.”
And our tongues have become too heavy to chant songs or offer “Amens.”
Beneath my sister’s neck, scars have sewn themselves into a portrait.
In my dream, my country rolls away with the night, into emptiness.
The next day, we became living things.
Sa’ada Isa Yahaya is a fifteen year old Nigerian teenage author, poet and a spoken word artist. She hails from Okene Local Government Area of Kogi State. She is a proud member of the Hilltop Creative Art Foundation and a student of Jewel Model Secondary School Kubwa, Abuja. She is a second runner up for the AS ABUGI National Prize for Short Story and for the 2023 National Creative Writing Competition for Secondary Schools (Poetry Category).Her poem “Nothing beautiful lasts forever” came second in the Creators of Justice Literary Award 2023 ( Youth Category). She has her works forthcoming or have appeared in Kalahari review, Stripes Little Magazine, World Voices Magazine, Eboquills, Synchronized Chaos and elsewhere.