Stories From Young African Poets: Nonexistent Boundaries Of Pamilerin Jacob.

The cow eats grass.

Its tail wriggles, wriggles —

a beheaded snake.

Where Boundaries Cease

Lying in bed, I woke to see a Skeleton standing by the bed. I was 4 with no semblance of what skeletons should look like, but there it was, menacing, mute. I remember most of all my terror — my scream, a wild fire engulfing the house — and my dad’s dash into the room, on his tongue, “In the NAME of Jesus!” He held onto me as the Skeleton disappeared.

I remember little else.

—

In JSS2, in an essay on a ‘story from childhood,’ I wrote about it to the chagrin of my classmates and teacher. To them, I had wandered into fiction for the sake of a good score. My notoriety for flunking on tasks did not help. I was one of the kids who spent all of break time role-playing ‘police and thief’ or ‘catcher.’ Very little sense of duty and responsibility, they surmised.

Worse, the teacher tried psychoanalyzing. Skeleton as abusive persona repressed, transfigured by memory. That did not help but it did teach me to question my own experiences, which I would come to learn, is not always a bad thing.

Yet, I saw the Skeleton. Dad belted out prayer in faith. The Skeleton disappeared.

—

At risk of exaggeration, I must admit I do not think of the experience often. However, it taught me, early on, there are no distinct worlds — as Rilke puts it, “Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living / they are moving among, or the dead.”

Where else are the boundaries of Things erased, redefined but in poems? Goats and cows, hens and pigeons, dragonflies, butterflies — nothing is entirely itself. 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. Door knobs were the wall’s elbows, my crucifix bore the bleeding Christ not his image.

Amid that mania, I wrote this tiny poem, still unpublished:

The cow eats grass.

Its tail wriggles, wriggles —

a beheaded snake.

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Hannah Omokafe Dennis

Hannah Omokafe Dennis Is A 24-year-old Journalist, Voice-Over artist and UNFPA Adolescent Sexual Reproductive Health Rights Advocate Living In Nigeria. She Currently Serves As A Community Manager In Konya Shamsrumi AndHas Some Of Her Written Works Published On Writer's Space Africa and audio stories on Genti media. She Enjoys Using Words And Her Voice To Tell Stories. She Tweets @Omokafe_forite.

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