Written piece
Across Common Lives
Sharifuddin Adamu
Nigeria
About this piece
This poem is part of my personal story growing up in Kwalla town, Quan-Pan L.G.A Plateau State.
My Father bought a hand bike that turned out to be a stolen property. The police dragged my father to station that evening. The beginning like a joke due to my father's reputation.
Across Common Lives
Sadiq learn earlier
the math of the gavel,
How easily wood splinters
behind shadows of golds
The khaki van reversed
Net fibers snapped, one by one. Torn.
A gaping mouth.
Bare feet. Hot road.
Mama shadow's stretching,
thinning, failing to catch the red taillight.
The prison is a rust
climbing the iron bars
Like old wounds reopening
Mosquitoes stitched their songs
into the heat-soaked dark
A dying bulb swung,
overhead
Its weak light trembling against the wall
There stood Sadiq
with his truth drying , on his tongue
his innocence trudged behind his teeth
When he spoke,
the dust on the table wrote down nothing
The wall absorbed his words,
not lawyer.
At home, Mama spreads
a frayed prayer mat
gathers evenings into her cupped palms
The cupboard echoes
a rusted tin yields only a
few stubborn coins
She lets them fall back
one by one,
then reaches instead for a worn god
smooth as river stone
She lingers her soul in the prayer
the only possession nothingness spares
for common lives
Across common lives
justice slips barefoot
through back door
From Kwalla town to Abuja's embrace
Behind glass, statutes sleep
the constitution dances
songs of the privileged
in bright pages that tantalize
the common man's eyes
the scale wears a skin of dust
Laws hang beneath a clenched fist
while power,
drunk on its own reflection,
Scribbles decrees across night