Toyin Adewale-Gabriel

Toyin Adewale-Gabriel is the author of Naked Testimonies, Die Aromaforscherin and Flackernde Kerzen. She is the editor of 25 New Nigerian Poets and co-editor, Inkwells and Breaking The Silence. She is a Fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude and has been Writer in Residence at the Villa Waldberta, Munich and The Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators, Visby, Sweden. An MA degree holder from the Obafemi Awolowo University, Adewale-Gabriel has published poems, stories and book reviews in various journals and newspapers. She has served in an executive capacity on the board of the Association of Nigerian Authors whose official annual journal, ANA Review she also edited. Toyin who has read her poems and stories to audiences in Nigeria, South Africa, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Italy and Luxemburg founded the Women Writers of Nigeria, WRITA, in 1991.

Published on January 30, 2008

Harp digging for treasure,
here l am, a pearl sitting on my bum.
Offer me a dance, pull me close,
nourish my braids...

Music - Poems by Toyin Adewale-Gabriel

LISTEN TO YOURSELF

Where is a word to hold the edge of blue waters
when the waves wrestle like rival wives?

Where is a word to hold a woman
when she runs, runs, runs…

where is a word to stamp out a fire
when a sky has no home?

Listen to yourself.
Listen to the gossip of seas,
washing up Nombolisa's cooking stones.
Listen to derelict hope
swinging cloth hangers at the green lights.
Listen to the man you cannot touch
the manacled children, the rubbished innocence.

MUSIC

Noon, under a sun that's lost its fire,
your blue harp slakes its thirst for song,
stretching its chords, wings of fire,
arching on tiptoes, a busybody,
unearthing the ages, like a
baby hungrily thrusting a nipple into her mouth.

Harp digging for treasure,
here l am, a pearl sitting on my bum.
Offer me a dance, pull me close,
nourish my braids and l shall
ascend, rung by rung,
past the corridors of rust,
past the aching rivers,
past the lips l cannot kiss.
I shall stand on the earth
by the waters of rest.

FELDAFING

We had silence like nowhere else
barkless dogs, babies sleeping in strollers.

We had the miracle of first fruits,
pristine air, a budding spring.

We had a garden of potato fries,
we owned a lake - full of laughter.

You and l and a mountain road.

We had a mascot of neon
preserved by the force of dreams.

We were triumphant, we knew loss
hungry and thirsty, we licked the dew

off the face of morning.