Maryam Yusuf Zubairu is a school teacher and poet. She writes from Kaduna, Nigeria. She has keen interest in the art of hosting book chats and a number of her works can be found on her instagram page @emwhyzee__. She was the second runner up of the Gimba Suleiman Hassan Esq Poetry Prize 2023. Her poem “My ancestors wildest dreams”, got long listed in the Brigitte Porson Literature Prize 2023. Her poems have appeared in Libretto Magazine, Konya Shamsrumi (KSR) and Sevhage Review. She has also performed on cozy stages and before roaring audiences at For the Love of Poetry, Kano and Kaduna Hilltop. She is passionate about her deen, words, the moon, taking long walks and self-betterment in all parts of life.
QUIET FLAME
I have held onto virtue for so long
patience has lost its meaning.
My bones are worn-out shoes
peeling off by the sides,
breaking at the soles.
But tonight the oceans are on overdrive.
I am bursting at my seams
and in all my child-like honesty,
all my God fearing soul yearns for
is to be tamed by your lips
to be quietened down into
the lone candle by your bedside
holding your soft gaze
Until the first light.
——————–
UNLEARNING YOU
When time finds something worth ticking for
And stops moving like a pregnant cloud
When the land is a drained carcass
With no rain to breathe life into it
When the sea is drained
And all that’s left is the sand’s secrets
When all traces of you is
Erased from the library of my mind
When the world stops learning
I might unlearn to love you too.
——————–
FORGOTTEN LANGUAGE
I am a frequenter of whispering to the heavens
My tongue has mastered every letter to
Seeking forgiveness, every call to the unseen
But transcendent, every praise for His grace
The words of divine letters are etched
In my memory like the lines on my palms
My limbs know when to stand and bow
Even in the darkest of nights
But I have shed tears whose taste remain
On my tongue like sour pineapples
And on those nights the words
The movements and the praises
Were forgotten like an outdated calendar
Like the gradual decline of the sun
Losing the language of prayer
Grows the silence into a stormy canopy
I guess even prayer requires peace
——————–
MULTIPLE MOONS
(after Billy Collins)
What if we lived on a planet
That housed multiple moons
Instead of the single radiance
We scour for every mid-month
And what if they always came alive
Together, albeit with gentle grace
Like the gradual rise of
The roar of a club house
There would be enough light
To trace the howl of the wolf
And for a while
Brugghen’s man’s burning candle
Might rest on the cold shelf
But think of the twosome taking a night stroll
With hands laced together like vines
And eyes wandering up in nervousness
Each to find some calmness in their own moon
——————–
NO RUSH
At night, you stretch languidly
As if you had just woken up from sleep
By day,
You gallop and jab your soft fists
Against fluids and skin
But we are at the edge of life
it is time to come home
Sweet
love
To see the world
For all its brightness and gloom
Change brings quite the scare
Mother is afraid as well
You are not to blame
I would not hurry
Into to this world either
