A day-old butterfly, two dragonflies sipping
morning juice from the well-spread leaf of a giant yucca,
bent over blue rose petals at the corner of
Alfred Hitchcock’s garden, built in an early
post-colonial time in Jos, nestled between two folds
of a brown mountain, signify love. They belong, also,
to the earth, this trinity of wings, of God the beautiful,
God the transparent father filming his holy Mary with hymns.
Nothing suggested a holocaust, until those who sought
the faces of the virgins of heaven, seen from the balconies
of the houses of the natives of Jhar, arrived with ploughshares
lit with sprouts of flames. This was how we loved
when the garden fell into the hands of the shepherds
who often burned the sheep thinking they are too bright
to be sheep under the lights of the night phlox. With violet
and carbon black, I wrote your name on the stalks of the coral
bells which grew beside the rock where we first met, where
we first kissed. You buried mine in the depth of your tongue,
the kingdom of sweet buds, to taste of what we will remember
after the small wars, which put a bayonet between us,
cut us in two. Your mother airlifted you, through the hills
of our memories, over the tryst we made with onyx,
to the Maldives, even as I stretched out my hands, from the long
bus filled to the windows on his way to Badagry, to touch
the lines on the soft furs of your palms. When I finally returned
to the coral bells in 2019, old, my hair a bloom of snow, I called
your maiden name, Eva. It tightened the music, as soft as water,
that once dipped itself in the world of a street piano which played
without being touched, at the end of the playground we were
Elizabeth’s little children, running in and out of a white British
Christmas. I wilted before the coral bells on which my tears
drizzled. On which grew our lives from two separate ways, made
entirely of distant wars, made entirely of dust and tremor.
Tamani Tatiana Sale
Tamani Tatiana Sale loves writing about everything that trembles her heart and everything that softens it. She is a writer, a poet and a biochemist. When she’s not writing you’ll catch her listening to music, reading novels or books related to psychology. She is drawn to photography and writing due to her love for creativity and art. She love tech gadgets and when she’s not writing, you’ll catch her listening to music especially Afro-pop, binging movies, reading novels and series or reading books related to psychology and self-help.
Tamani Tatiana Sale writes from Jos. She writes about everything that trembles and softens her heart. She is a writer, a poet and a biochemist. She was shortlisted for 2023 Koffi Addo Writivism non friction prize. She is a Jhar woman, who speaks the dhouri dialect, from Dull district of Tafawa Balewa local government of Bauchi State. She is not Hausa though she speaks it fluently.
Tamani has participated in various Teambooktu competitions- in photography and poetry- bagging a longlist nomination in the Kene Offor/Teambooktu Poetry Competition. Recently, she was short-listed in The Kayode Adenirokun Poetry Prize supported by CORA and Teambooktu.
- Tamani Tatiana Sale#molongui-disabled-link
- Tamani Tatiana Sale#molongui-disabled-link
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