First, you call the map a song
and the song is as a love hidden in
stones as if to say all of human
history is about building still,
some towering halls leaning towards
me, and to this you say, history
is about movements too, but how
does a stone move in it? To the love,
what is yet a migrant bliss when
a mother looks at her child’s first
leap like a transactional bill and
says, “what floats within the space
transforms me.” She meant, here,
movement is defining and so a place
is a journey built of it. The stride
and the mother joined with the child
by the unbroken song of beauty. To
the map, I am defining my home,
what stone breaks me in or I break upon.
Adeeko Ibukun is an award-winning Nigerian poet. He was awarded the 2nd Prize in the Sentinel All-Africa Poetry Competition in 2012 and his poem, “A Room with a Drowning Book,” won the 2015 Babishai Niwe African Poetry Prize in Uganda. Ibukun was also a guest at the Lagos International Poetry Festival and Ake Arts and Book Festival in 2015. He lives and writes in Abeokuta, Nigeria.