A Review of Abdulrazaq Salihu’s poem, “Ode to memory” by Yusrah M. Dzukogi
Ode to memory.
At our first date you sought signs
Of a bloodbath in my eyes.
Other than love, nothing
Had the guts to rest in the glimmer
Of my eyes. Your lips have exhausted
Their light to lick at my wound.
There was a part of the moon
In our wine cups. There was memory
Of a gazan massacre on the softness
Of our steaks. Outside, in the pretence of calmness,
Namenj’s sai watarana syncs with the night.
Reflection was our way
of kissing the things we never have
To reach. We hid our tongues
Under each other’s mouth.
Your teeth are a sunflower in the meadow.
Your gold tooth is a treasure in the Nile.
I know every borderline on your skin,
And I know where you close yourself like a wither
In a leaf. Smiles toppled in the indigo of lights
We moved into a song at the mouth of timelessness
Music is a gateway bud in the arm of desperation
I like how you smell of neatly cut lemongrass
I like how we kiss without the touching of our deaths.
In Ode to memory, the poet crafts a tender, haunted recollection of love that swings between the deeply personal and the politically charged. It reads like a memory unfolding in dim light, disoriented, yet punctuated by moments of piercing clarity. There’s something cinematic about this poem, like you can imagine some flickers of light, image and also feeling.
The opening is quite pleasing:
“At our first date, you sought signs of a bloodbath in my eyes.” Immediately, we’re brought into a space where love and trauma coexist, where a glance can carry both the weight of history and the promise of tenderness. This duality runs through the whole piece. The beautiful and the brutal, constantly brushing against each other.
I believe one of the poem’s strengths is its bold imagery:
“There was a part of the moon in our wine cups.” “Your teeth are a sunflower in the meadow.” “Your gold tooth is a treasure in the Nile.” These lines flirt with surrealism, but they’re grounded by a palpable emotional core. The metaphors are rich without being ornamental, they reveal how the speaker sees their lover as a landscape, as memory, as myth.
The line: “There was memory of a Gazan massacre on the softness of our steaks.” is particularly striking, it effortlessly made me more intrigued by the poem. I wanted to keep reading the poem. It softly pulls the reader sharply out of the romantic atmosphere and into the global, the violent, the real (reality). It asks how we carry the world’s suffering in our private moments, how love exists in the shadow of ongoing injustice. This kind of juxtaposition is rare, beautiful and brave, and it gives the poem a necessary friction. I sense the music of the language to be gentle, almost whispered. There’s enjambment and softness in the phrasing, creating a dreamlike flow. But it’s not without structure, each image feels carefully placed.
The closing line: “I like how we kiss without the touching of our deaths” leaves us with a quiet, aching beauty. There’s peace here, but also a ghost of danger and tragedy, an acknowledgment that love is always lived at the edge of something larger.
Ode to memory is a poem that deeply resonates with one, It’s not a poem that asks to be understood all at once. It asks to be felt. It’s layered with longing, with grief, with sensuality, and with history. It doesn’t resolve its tensions, it holds them. And that’s where its power lies.
