Illustration by Anne Le Guern

Listen:

Today, like other days of my conscious
existence, my tongue is at war with a new language —

fomenting a conflict of translation in my mouth —
the wound flowering out of the crust of skin.

I write in a language I do not think in, and dream in
one different from both. When I go out

to buy a loaf of bread from the kiosk nestled
between two streets, I speak another: abeg do quick,

give me bread! My tongue is like a barn
of many grains. When I pray others can see it,

the future graffitied on the back of my palms —
In Salat I speak Arabic, a language I do not speak,

foreign to my people — a colonizer’s tool —
If my God only answers supplication in a dialect

I do not understand, is He still my Lord? Lately,
I go deep in my belief that a question is a door

out of blasphemy, and not into it — And she,
my mother — a professor in her own Madarasa,

says a song carries a civilization on its lilt.
Sometimes the best part of a song has no words.

Bring other things I like and talk about a slanted hill
where the sky can touch the ground — where dawn

reveals the ache in every man’s heart — but
what is every man’s heart, what is anything?

Saddiq Dzukogi
Saddiq Dzukogi’s poetry collection Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) was named one of the 29 best poetry collections by Oprah Daily. His chapbook Inside the Flower Room was selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the APBF New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Series. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Society of America, Poetry Wales, and other literary journals and magazines. He was a finalist for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships and grants from the Nebraska Arts Council, Pen America, the Obsidian Foundation, and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he is a PhD student and serves as an assistant poetry editor for Prairie Schooner.