MY ROAD

Hello family, first of all I want to apologies to everyone for my silence. I have been offline almost a year from this family. The reason being, I was healing and putting  myself together after the aftermath of the COVID-19 in Sierra Leone and other underlying life bugging elements especially when trapped inside the ring of unemployment and others – Anyways, I was born to conquer!

Today I am so so happy to say after working on my first book 'My Road' for two years, it is finally up on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/My-Road-collection-poems-illustrations-ebook/dp/B0B3SJ2YHB .   If you are in Nigeria you can get it here https://itanile.org/downloads/my-road/Apologies for sharing it now.

This is my first collection of poetry written and compiled as part of a project supported by the Prince Claus Fund and Wayoutarts. This book is going to take you all on a journey along the palm-fringed beaten earth roads of my childhood home in rural Sierra Leone.

Wait! Before you go check ‘My Road’ I wanted to share this piece with you as well ‘’Telling Tales’’ Ibrahim S Bangura –First Published On City Lit [Between Lines An Anthology of Creating Writing] For more information, please check their website: https://www.citylit.ac.uk/malorie-blackman-scholarships . If you are creative writer you can browse their courses www.citylit.ac.uk/writing Hope you enjoy it!

 ‘’Telling Tales’’

In the night, as the moon gathered her body into the sky

We village kids would knock hard on friends’ doors like tax collectors

Reminding them about the arrival of the moon

If it was out but young we’d say in Themne

‘or ngof eh put a kereh eh feth rs’

if it was bright as a queen’s future we’d say

‘Or ngof eh wang a’

Wearing baggy trousers and wide shirts

We flocked to where the moon hunched

Sometimes one of us carried a friend on his back

Like a soldier with a rucksack

or, holding on to each other’s clothes from behind, we formed a human

train

to express our delight in cracking imaginary tales

we used to say the moon has legs so she travels across the world

her father is God and the stars her siblings

we’d say the sun has eyes, hands, a mouth and a life

during the day, in the sky, she stares at people

in the evening the sun goes to the sea to drink

we’d say she has a deep gut and a short throat

in the middle of telling tales we’d say

goats, sheep and cows ’eyes are white stones

cocks have clocks in their stomachs so they can always sound the alarm

and monkeys give birth only when rain and sunlight fall together

we would fling tales between ourselves like birthday balloons

until we ran from each other as the night grew stronger