These three poems by Hannatu Bilyaminu were especially chosen for The Bala Selection.
The Bala Selection is a bi-weekly poetry feature curated by Ismail Bala for Konya Shamsrumi, showcasing distinctive new voices and resonant works from across Africa and beyond. Through his discerning eye, each selection highlights the craft, music, and emotional clarity that define contemporary poetry in its most luminous form.
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.
Love in Fragments
Each time the phone rings, she forgets how to breathe.
The shrill sound slices through her like shrapnel.
She stares at it, heart thudding loud enough to drown the silence.
Is it him?
Is it not?
Is this the call that unravels everything?
War has no schedule. Neither does grief. Or waiting.
She’s learned to live between rings
between rumours of gunfire and the long,
unbearable hush that follows.
Still, she waits. Every time.
Because he is still hers,
out there in dust and danger.
And when he comes home, he doesn’t return whole.
He is still tall, strong, and broad,
But war has carved stories into his body that words can’t hold.
A scar runs across his side. Mean, dark, and permanent.
the spot where a bullet kissed him
and left her a lifetime of second chances.
She loves that scar now.
Loves the way it interrupts his skin
like a reminder: he survived.
His hearing is half gone,
stolen by an explosion he doesn’t talk about.
When she speaks to him, she must raise her voice,
tilt her head, fight for his attention
like everything else he’s fighting in his head.
She doesn’t mind.
If shouting is the cost of being heard,
She will speak louder than war itself.
She walks slowly beside him now.
He limps, another souvenir from a place he doesn’t name.
She matches his pace without complaint,
measures her love in steps and quietness,
in the act of keeping time with someone who runs towards fire.
His hands are rough, callused, cracked, and bruised
from holding guns and gripping steel.
But they are still the hands that held her.
She presses her lips on them and says a prayer,
runs her fingers across the hardened skin
as if trying to soothe all he can’t say.
At night, when the house sits still and shadows gather,
She sits beside him in silence.
He cannot tell her what he saw, what he did, what he lost.
But she stays.
She stays because she knows that her nearness
helps more than questions ever could.
Sometimes, the war comes home with him.
It lives in his screams. In his fists.
There are nights he forgets who she is,
lashes out with a terror that isn’t meant for her
But still bruises all the same.
Her brother helps hold him down until the storm passes.
She stays even when staying hurts.
She stays because of love, real love,
sometimes looks like choosing madness in a man
who chose madness for his country.
She knows what it costs him to love her through the fog.
And she knows what it costs her to love him through the fire.
Her love is not fractured by the pieces he has lost.
Her love is whole.
And that, somehow,
It’s enough to hold them both together.
Threads of Moonlight
I love the crease on my mother’s forehead.
A roadmap
drawn by years of quiet storms.
Each line,
a river carved by love and labour.
Each furrow,
a prayer etched in sacrifice.
Her silver strands
are threads of moonlight,
woven by hands
that never rested.
They whisper stories
of burdens borne in silence,
like the time she held my swollen feet
through failed attempts to find a vein,
and cradled my shaved head,
praying softly
When the world thought I was gone.
Mirror on the wall
The mirror does not create.
It shows what the world dares not:
a smile carved out of smoke,
a laugh stitched into rot.
It knows the story I sheath with my jokes,
the tears that leave behind no trace,
just a shadow.
Nights drip slowly before these eyes.
This glass shatters in reverse.
It isn't broken, but it's breaking me.
At every glance, an exhibition
of a phase I wish to flee.
I do not hate the mirror.
I loathe its honesty.
About Hannatu Bilyaminu
Hannatu Bilyaminu is a bilingual writer and poet whose work explores love, grief, motherhood, and identity. Her writing moves between languages, tracing memory, loss, and the shifting meanings of home. Through intimate and reflective pieces, she captures the complexities of love, absence, and becoming. She holds an MSc in Mass Communication and works as a translator.
