Two poems by Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi
Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi, Frontier I, a Nigerian-Hausa poet, digital artist, and photographer is a graduate of Medical Laboratory Science from Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto. She is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Sixteen Songs of Loss, selected as a finalist by Rita Mookerjee (Sundress Publications Chapbook Competition, 2023), winner of the inaugural Folorunsho Editor’s Poetry Prize 2023, Labari Poetry Prize 2023, the inaugural Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature 2023, and Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize, 2022. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Fiyah Literary Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Agbowo, The Deadlands, Torch Literary Arts, Arc Poetry Magazine, Ake Review, Native Skin, The Drift, Lucent Dreaming, 20.35 Africa, Canthius, Trampset, and elsewhere. She tweets @ZainabBobi.
A Poem Where Every Full Stop is Ceasefire
for the thousands of Palestinian children killed by Israel's airstrikes
insomnia & my eyes
lovers ceasefire
rest is a myth,
says my reality
ceasefire
even if my dream isn't about activism
i will think it a protest ceasefire
i will say robbed
if asked of childhood
ceasefire
i will say graveyard
if asked of home ceasefire
i will say shattered
if asked of tenderness
ceasefire
truth: i search for night in airstrikes
ceasefire
for oxygen
in strides of phosphorus ceasefire
for families in rubbled
homes ceasefire
for resemblance
in flowers ceasefire
for bluebirds in crows ceasefire
for mornings in mourning ceasefire
someday, a child will say
the ruin
smells familiar
ceasefire
& i will tell her her family tree
went lost under the rubble ceasefire
in the end, i will teach her
to write
her name on her arm
& raise it when she gets lost,
too ceasefire
but the end's end
will be ceasefire إن شاء الله ceasefire
17 - 10 - 23 : 02 - 11 - 23
from the martyrs of Al Ahli Arab Hospital and Jabalia Refugee Camp
If you hear of our deaths
later in the day
know that the airstrike
has finally caught up
with us & the world
watched how the survivors
dug our bodies
from under the rubble
& the sky had asthma
& the rain washed, prepared
for the next spill & earth
became constipated
too much blood too many bodies in a week
& night screamed, let me sleep, let me dream.
& post-airstrike, people asked
why leave the door open for 72 years
while the question should've been,
how do you shut the door of a war
that takes the name of a genocide?