Mubarak Said is the 3rd runner-up of the poetry category of the 2022 Bill Ward Prize for Emerging Writers. His works are forthcoming and published in many literary magazines local and international as World Voices Magazine, Icefloe Press, Literary yard, Beatnik Cowboy, Teen Literary Journal, ILA magazine, the yellow magazine,  Pine Cone Review, Synchronized chaos, Susa Africa, Applied Worldwide, Opinion Nigeria, Today Post, Daily Trust, Daily Companion and elsewhere.

The Tale Of A Wrecked Boy

I was asked once to sketch 
The portrait of ghosts and memories.
Now, I learn that any child with out 
The theory of pain in his veins is a corpse.
Perhaps, a fence has been erected on my eye, 
The room is now a valley, 
Where a woman's eye is the source of a sea;
Where the flowers are the butterflies 
To shield from rains and bullets.
Here, in fatherland, a mother's breast is a venom
& to kill an ant is another way to survive.
In this little poem, a boy narrates 
The tale of his hometown.
To love a man is to slaughter his daughter.
To move is to knock the door of death.
Today there's no ink for our poetry,
& no names for metaphors and similes.
Here, mourning is a synonym to silence 
& silence is a crime.

Caged

I'm now a wingless bird, leaning on the edge
Of the terror – weak and exhausted.

As i inhale the slavery scent,
My nose barricaded, breathe, breathe, breathe...

I, like a rainbow on the rainy sky
Bearing the colors of grief, sad and regression.

I call upon the name of freedom
In a daydream slumber and in nightmares.

The caged bird's words are as like an empty drum
And like air crossing the empty sky.

My voice became inaudible
As my mouth is buried in the sands of an abandoned land.

My hands, chained with metals
And my legs can't move to cross the fortresses, why?

The wing-less butterfly is an antonym to a snail.

It is written, on the forehead of the sky, 
that any child without a theory of flowers 
would Someday mourn the moon of its vastness.

The day my body teleported us 
to my father’s hometown, 
we witnessed the pregnant butterfly 
bloom into a basket of flowers 
with every vegetative part slowly fading into exile,
fading into scrapped blocks of a kingdom—where 
kings were turbaned with a garment made of lies.

There is a day in the cycle of the year 
where fire strikes the wall of men's face, 
the day that memories used to fly into the sky; 
the beacon of light spills the beans 
of our growth—perhaphs 
this is the way men managed to nurture wings.

Over here, the eye that doesn’t see is the eye 
that refuses to be fed light. 

Whenever the wind sways 
before the curtain of our  faces, 
note; fingers become lines of latitude 
running across our longitudinal bodies.

here, with our hands we slaughter the sky, 
& with our mouths we lick the blood 
of the moon—so, tell me, 
Is there a better way to mourn the madness we've grown to enjoy playing?