By: Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo
Your father's father; our lord, our colonizer; old owl with barrel and telescope.
Your pope; my teacher at high school, my brother's violator; another wrath in between the holy trousers.
Your war; our war, our sisters, learning hundred songs of grief; another rain of blood about to fall.
Our earth; your world and mine falling apart; another beginning coming to an end, every tree becoming autumn.
Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo is a Nigerian poet & a Veterinary Medical Student, whose first love is art making. He is an avid reader, who sees poetry in everything, with great interest in storytelling. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net. His work has been appeared, or forthcoming from: Iman Collectives, Southern Humanity Review, Tipton Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Olongo Africa, Roanoke Review, Watershed Review, Panoplyzine, Gyroscope Review, Kissing Dynamite, The Night Heron Barks Review, Santa Ana River Review, Stand Magazine, Louisiana Literature, Obsidian: Literature and Art in the African Diaspora, Collateral Journal, Welter Journal, Levitate Magazine and elsewhere.
Artist statement for "Badal":
Badal (بدل) is an Arabic word which means apposition or lieu.
In this poem I explored the phenomena of colonial and post-colonial incidents and antecedents; how colonialism has never been totally overcame in the African communities full of self and foreign-inflicted wars and how the earth we all owned is being dominated by supremacy, thereby the vultures are laughing and the pigeons are crying, what a world full of injustice.