Let me say this: writing a poem somehow saves me. In the sense that, an animal of experience has been let out its cage, has been given freedom: an experience has left me so it loses the power to taunt me. In giving my experience the luxury of language, I have freed it and in turn freed myself. For instance, writing about my depression has greatly helped me cope with it.

The Gathering is a short but very good work of many to come, initiating that only when we gather, we move forward and make the world better.

KSR Collective member, Richard Ali, hosted the fourth #SoapboxSession in Abuja yesterday. His guest was city poet, novelist and public communications expert, Michaela Moye.

It's always easier to distance oneself from the parts of us that we don't understand or cannot control and for me that is my giant bleeding heart that wants to adopt all the puppies in the world and give everyone ice cream to make them all less sad about capitalism.

Africa in its potential and realities is me, it's us. It’s a reckoning with ourselves. It’s a becoming. Movement and stillness. Where past, present, and future bleed into each other.

Sampa The Great has tears, true tears, when the audience flows with her as a whole body. For myself, I felt touched by the courage of an outstanding presence, out of shyness.

Africa in its potential and realities is me, it's us. It’s a reckoning with ourselves. It’s a becoming. Movement and stillness. Where past, present, and future bleed into each other.

All of this has gotten me thinking not only about language and its intricacies but about existing translated poetic work, from English to other languages, and vice versa. What makes a good translation?