Ever since I was in Nursery school, I fell in love with those nursery rhymes and songs that even at home, I was always with my book simply because I wanted to recite it.
However as I grew older shyness overcame the confidence that I initially had and I did not get to interact with poetry again up until I got to university.
Initially, poetry was just another subject in school, words strung together, one after the other. As a child, my mind was more focused on the empty cans waiting to be filled with sand or crushing biscuits into paste to bake into cake. I don’t know where the concept of time immemorial fits into the corners of my memory, but words have always lived somewhere in my heart. I just didn’t know exactly where, so I never bothered to visit.
I grew up enchanted by sound and rhymes, from my grandmother's folksongs to the English nursery rhymes I devoured.
At first, the idea of sharing it with girls in our class never came to mind; but, soon the spirit of youth began to spring in our souls, we began to hear the whispers of our hearts and our minds believed it was love.
For some reason, my then-class mistress singled me out of the kids to run her errands, having me go to the post office whenever she had a letter to post, this was often a weekly or every fourth night. These letters, I went to the post office for were the foundation of my creative writing path. I didn’t know this simple errand would be an adaptation that would follow me into adulthood and later become an integral part of my life.
So when in the psych ward in 2016, words leaked out of me like pus, I did not worry about the boundary of this or that. Cows and pigeons filled the room from the fields of childhood. I let the sun be a coin, did not resist seeing the moon’s arc as a shiny scar in the night sky.
Through poetry, I was able to express the inexpressible, to give voice to the emotions that threatened to consume me. I wrote about love, loss, longing, hope and the universal human experiences that connect us all.
I’ve carried that mindset in every piece I write, I never use my phone to write. Instead I lock myself away with my laptop that only has Microsoft word paired with a thought-racing mind. Most times before I write a good poem I’m very hungry, I probably wouldn’t have eaten the whole day. Me being uncomfortable pushes my brain to lock in, not get distracted and finish the work so I can be comfortable again.
Since I was born, daddy bought us books. He was a writer himself, writing stories in notebooks that ended up in corners of the house, unpublished. Had my father been born in more recent times, he’d be a great writer, I think.
