ALL COLOURS AGREE IN THE DARK

& I remember the delicious orange of the day-squeezed sun. Once, I found my heartbeats stencilled in a girl’s
palms, & that was how I swallowed another synonym for longing. Farida, let this wet needle that is my tongue
stitch you a garden of fresh elegies. In this sapphire evening, jewelled with rain, a muezzin’s call slices the air with
his fluting Arabic tongue. The scent of his warm devotion guitars through the streets from Almohap Central
Mosque, where bowed men litter the earth on splayed mats, their salaat beaming from blotched foreheads,
hallowing the ground into a rapture of ‘Allahu Akbar!’—the earth slick with the onset of rain. A throng of
Fulani women in bright red, yellow, & purple hijabs lords its way through the streets, balancing buckets of
Danwake, Fura Da Nono, & Awara on their drenched scalps. Between the scissoring of seconds, they blur into a
loom of pigment beneath the see-through veil of rain. Rain is God stitching the earth with a thread of water. I
know, all colours shimmer to the reggae of the sun. This, I’m told, is the sacrament of creation. To be rainbowed
like you—is to be the anatomy of light. Child of light: Farida. Once, you asked how my name sprouted, & by
name, I thought you meant my genesis. I remember floating in the lucid curves of your accent. I remember
morphing all your questions into an ellipsis of silence. & like hunger, thirst never quenches. I wanted to tell you
that I’m floating the shores of our spinning blue, because I am the first raven Noah sent to spy the earth after it
drank too much water—and since then, I have found no resting place other than the nest your voice twigs to
swaddle my name. Farida, seed me where your bones are most soft. Let me be a germination of muscle, marrow,
& thrums. & let the only thing fit for scattering be every dusk-frosted sunbeam that never made it to dawn—our
dawn—which blooms across our separate skies, knotting our earth-scents into a miracle in smithereens. & this is
how I know that God is a Gardener: He made you out of fresh lilies.