The Day Begins Here with Tenderness

Joemario Umana

The day begins here with tenderness, with greetings as long as your arm— ina kwana, lafiya kalau.  ya ke jiya, lafiya kalau. ya kwana biyu, lafiya kalau.  ya kake, lafiya kalau.  ya gidanku, lafiya kalau— petaled smiles and blue optimism, kindness of a stranger paying your transport fare and softness dressed in kaftans, hijabs, and jalabiya. I, a child of water, a nyamiri far from home, can’t help but marvel in this language fluently spoken. Here, peace, the lushness of morning when the muezzin braids the air with prayer. I walk through it like someone searching for the mouth of a river, hoping that gentleness can be carried southward like birds swimming in the wind. But my country refuses to soften. It holds its wound the way a mother holds a child. Everywhere I turn, the news is another body, another city learning how to set itself on fire. How do you tell a nation to breathe when its lungs are full of smoke? I wish the calm this place now holds could spill over the map, pour itself into the cracks of our broken mornings, the same way women pour water at their doorsteps at dawn to settle dust. But peace is only a visitor here. It sits with us, drinks kunu, laughs, touches our cheeks with cool fingers, and when night comes, it packs its small bag and walks away. And yet, I keep looking northward, hoping that if I name this softness enough times it might grow wings, might descend on the places where boys run with fear threaded to their shadows and girls learn to pray with half-closed mouths. I am learning that love, too, is a country, one forever on the brink of burning, yet I stand in its fields, gathering every gentle thing I can find like someone saving light for a future that refuses to arrive.

About Joemario Umana

Joemario Umana, Swan XVII, is a Nigerian creative writer and a performance poet who considers himself a wildflower. His works have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Chestnut Review, Orange Blossom Review, Frontier Poetry, Uncanny Magazine, LOLWE, Strange Horizons, South Florida Poetry Journal, Ubwali Lit, ONE ART journal, Akpata Magazine, Poetry Sango-Ota, Poetry Column-NND, trampset and elsewhere. He was shortlisted for the Kayode Aderinokun Poetry Prize and the Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for literature, 2025. When life gives him a breathing space, he roams the streets of twitter as @JoemarioU38615.