Child-trafficking and child-labour are criminal and unjust. Sadly, many young girls who have been reduced to maids serving in homes in cities in Nigeria are daily abused, assaulted, raped and denied tasting the honey of knowledge. Dozens of such poor girls are yearning to have a better life and future, like the children they are paid peanuts to wash panties for or serve as nannies.

I still sit in absolute darkness. A voice. A soulful voice which becomes a place of shelter, a resort: A voice to heal the wounds of darkness and to chase the ghosts. The three artists speak out images of the past, sitting on the floor when light slowly guides us out of the darkness, their voices put the memories in place.

Thus, it is surmisable that whoever will contemplate the past eternity during which the world was not in existence and the future eternity during which it will not exist, will see that it is like a journey, in which the stages represented by years, the leagues by months, the miles by days and the steps by moments.

Harry Garuba (1958-2020), internationally acclaimed Nigerian scholar, poet, journalist, editor, anthologist and theorist.

I still sit in absolute darkness. A voice. A soulful voice which becomes a place of shelter, a resort: A voice to heal the wounds of darkness and to chase the ghosts. The three artists speak out images of the past, sitting on the floor when light slowly guides us out of the darkness, their voices put the memories in place.

The person (being me and anyone who finds the shoe a fit) who this poem would reach out to is someone who has worn her sad like a uniform too long and is tired of the way it hangs useless on her body, how it grips on parts it should let go and lifts with the wind of endless sad experiences.

Konya Shamsrumi: What is the process of writing a poem like for you? Is it a lot of hard work or easy? James Eze: Any writing that requires the use of the imagination does not come easy to me. It is often a cross between inspiration and hard work. For me, the process of writing a poem begins with an inspiration and ends with a lot of hard work. Usually, it comes in form of an idea, a thought or an impulse in the deep recess of my mind which could be triggered by an experience, an observation or a flash of insight from a book, a song, a movie or a mere ripple on the face of a stream.

Hence, while the historian's mind is riddled with events, the poet's is bursting with colour, having memory as its minefield. However, there is no fixity to verse. Not in its fidelity to what was or its facility for what will follow. Both past and future are the canvass upon which imagination subsists. Along the way, it rids itself of all ethical sympathies.