Ernest O. Ògúnyemí | a befitting burial | Poets Resist

Ernest O. Ògúnyemí is a writer from Nigeria. His poems and short stories have appeared/ are forthcoming in magazines, including: Yemassee, Indianapolis Review, Litro Magazine, Acumen Poetry Journal, Lucent Dreaming, 34 Orchards, Mementoes: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry, Erotic Africa: The Sex Anthology, and Agbowó, amongst other places. He is curating the Young African Poets Anthology.

Also by Ernest O. Ògúnyemí: Grief Will Remake You The Five-Second Kiss that Almost Ruined Me Two Poems

Poets Resist
Edited by Alicia Cole
March 27, 2020

Ernest O. Ògúnyemí

a befitting burial

for Leah Sharibu in my country, a girl has been missing for so long we have forgotten her name; we have forgotten that her father & mother cannot forget, that her little brother sees her enter the room every night. he sees her in his dreams. & in every one of them she’s wearing the moon. & there’re touches of red on her dress. & in her eyes, grains of salt. in each dream, she asks when light will find the hole. the president says there are more urgent matters, he says, Let those who have lost brother or sister or daughter know, they shall have a hundred in the world to come. & we agree, with the silence in our voices. at first, we noise with our fingers. we noise with placards. we noise with t-shirts bearing prints like “WE WON’T REST UNTIL L.S. IS FREED”. but the prints soon fade. our hands tire of raising. & our fingers want to tweet better things. so we turn to prayer. we knee-sex the earth every once in a while, when we’re not busy dreaming of a better life. we pray someday we find her body that we may give her a befitting burial.

This poem is about the abduction of a girl, Leah Sharibu. She was abducted by the militant group Boko Haram in Dapchi, Yobe State, on the 13th of February, 2018. The girl who was fourteen when she was abducted from her school — Government Junior Secondary School, Dapchi — clocked fifteen and sixteen years old in the Boko Haram custody on May 14, 2018 and on May 14, 2019. She is yet to be released.