Ismail Bala is a poet, translator, and critic whose work bridges classical poetics and modern sensibility, and whose mentorship has shaped a generation of emerging African poets. Born and educated to university level in Kano, he did his post-graduate studies at Oxford. His poems have been translated into Latvian, Belarusian, Nepalese, Slovenian and Polish. He is a Fellow of the International Writing Programme of the University of Iowa. He is the author of Line of Sight (Praxis, 2020), A Span of Something (INKspired, 2024) and Ivory Night (KSR, 2024), and Memory of Departure (Masobe, 2026). This selection is excerpted from a forthcoming collection, Night Keeper (Praxis, 2026).
Night Keeper
(after Paul Farley)
The last thing I do is turn the key
and draw the grilles across. I check the locks,
leaving a slit in the shutters ribs
to slip through. And in the breath
it takes to clear the doorway, as hours fold behind me,
I glance back at the hollow Ive carved
from noise. I do this every night.
Outside, the air hums with engines
and drizzle, and anything might begin.
——————–
The Flame and a Whisper
In seven breaths, the storm turns into longing:
the initial quiet revolt, the ascent, the disintegration
Fingers dipping into the simmering fire;
I’m whispering my warm mother’s secret name to her.
Like a silence on a quivering branch,
I was bare as I knelt before the stone-silent goddess
Prior to the dream’s shape turning inward
and the agonising desire; the broken word,
Behind me, the groan of bygone eras swelled;
the heat pulse, like a forgotten memory
And the silence dropping low,
the gentle chord of breath coming home like a freed mare
The unrestrained, untamed melody, the rupture,
the age-old surge of the tide, as she draws me, her prayer into her ravenous curve.
——————–
Clock and Chain
The truth is, this job is a slow kind of death.
I fake every smile; I ration my breath.
Mid-shift, I vanish inside my own head.
I come back wishing I were dead.
If I had a fire
Id suffer it all, let the hours expire
Then fall into something that didnt feel fake.
Instead
The hours grind my teeth to dust,
And when it ends, I wipe the rust
Off hopes I never quite believed.
The sky is clean.
The crow cackles from the wire each dawn.
Day after day
I refill the lies,
My small charade.
Night after night
I kill the torchlight, the whole light.
The bile I bury doesnt fade
Just waits. Its always stayed.
Theres always a cost.
You fake what youve lost.
Dont whine. Dont crack. Dont show youre mad.
This isnt hellBut it sure feels bad.
——————–
Before the Poem Finishes
She goes barefoot,
Living far from any centre,
Where even something insignificant can delight her
Or suddenly set her off.
She mutters her frustrations quietly,
And my own body tightens in response
A headache twists my stomach and rises toward my throat.
Sometime later,
She is still sliding downward,
Moving through open air,
Calm within the drifting traces of her unrestrained letting go.
Before the poem finishes,
Before time itself grows irritating,
The rain will surely fall hard.
Hereon a chair or lying in bed
She passes most of her life,
Most ho
urs of her days,
Sitting with silence, thinking.
At night,
She listens
As an old doum palm
Deepens its green.
