Dawn With My Father
at *subuh, my father does not ask the prayer rug
to bear his weight. he disciplines it with the sheer
force of his kissing knees. he greets the pre-dawn
chill with right hand clasped over his left.
when we pray together, we seem to move
like blades of grass, bending & straightening —
we kneel side by side, his shadow pressing
over mine like a second skin.
During *jalsa, we recite:
rabbighfir lee, rabbighfir lee
Lord, forgive me. My Lord, forgive me.
because sin is singular
our voices meet at the hush of water,
cleansing the eye of the air.
the room grows light each time we
press our foreheads to the mat —
the sunken breastbone of God softens
beneath the tip of our lineal noses.
when he stands again,
his hands rise like birds
that have memorised the sky.
we finish.
he remains kneeling as if
forgiveness takes longer to land
in men who ask gently.
afterwards, he doesn’t speak.
he adjusts his knees & asks me to pray.
then we sit
& the world held by a simple eruptive joy
sits with us.
*Subuh — the first of five obligatory prayers for Muslims performed at dawn or early morning.
*Jalsa — the sitting posture between the two prostrations.
Ikigai
as the city breathes again into itself, my mother begins
to mix the sky in a pot & stir anti clockwise,
unwinding the metal night.
the spoon is older than all of us in this house,
worn to the metal bones by the memories of her
callused fingers, still soft as the soul at childbirth.
the curves of the spoon never betrays the motion,
she never measures when the hand dips into
the grainy linguistics of salt & seasoning,
collecting histories of flavour stories, translating hidden hungers.
she whispers to the soup, the beef, the sardine fish
as if the palm oil will clear like a new day,
its surface a scrying pool,
arriving with depth, sensation & sweetness.
sometimes, she’ll sing into the cleaved onion,
the red pepper, the rising rice, the bubbles hitting the lid
with the same spoon like the same body —
awake, awake, imbued with life,
with the kind of purpose *ikigai preaches.
& I, too, have picked up this exact spoon,
felt the instinctual spirit of its handle
slither through my flexion creases.
I, too, partake in this bodily wisdom,
written in the wrist bones, knuckles & the rhythmic arc
of generations stirring light into the darkest hours.
a ritual of becoming, nourishing soul & blood.
*ikigai: a Japanese philosophical concept that refers to a passion that gives value and joy to life.
Ablution
after defeathering myself,
after food, after postcards to my long, wiry legs,
after breaking a mountain between me and my wife,
after calling my mother a forge,
i end the night with water —
cool, unburdened, grace gushing
from the tap's silver throat.
hands, mouth, nose, arms,
head, ears, feet. each part awakened
in the order it forgets.
About the author:
Abiodun Salako is a Journalist and Editor-in-Chief of Curating Chaos. His fractured pieces have been published or are forthcoming in LEON Literary Magazine, Sledgehammer Lit, Ink Sweat & Tears Magazine, LocalTrain Magazine, levatio, Bullshit Lit, Spill Words Press, EBOQuills, Kalahari Review, African Writer Magazine, Afrocritik, WriteNowLit and elsewhere.
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