biola olatunde | she sat in the room

she sat in the room

the heat,
her only clothing
urine and faeces
in a pail
in the corner,
the measure of a love
given foolishly to a
teacher,
hidden
from family and friends.

only sixteen and pregnant
no ante-natal care
taken out only at
night
like a felon of
some crime.

the pains came at midnight
was sneaked to
the hospital,
nine months in the dark
she looked like a ghost
giving birth to a ghostly
child
who died two days later.

each year at about
the same time
the pain overcomes
and she sits in
the dark
to apologize to
a child she
never knew.

I am

an enter-educate writer, fiction writer and poet. I have been writing for some 30 years now. I wrote a series of teenage drama stories that was sponsored by the United Nations Population Fund UNFPA which sponsored the series for television stations in my country Nigeria for more than two years. The series dealt with adolescent reproductive health issues. It was good enough for the Canadian International Agency to collaborate with UNFPA to have it adapted into radio series and also translated into pidgin as well as Hausa languages. I have also published on my own 5 literay works:

Stars in my eyes – which was about 3 women in an imaginary university campus in Nigeria | I almost did– poetry | Chants in my dreams – poetry | Tomorrow’s promise – poetry | The dream & Reality – An autobiography of my journey into writing | Meadows of my mind– a book of poetry I want to publish now. I like working with teenagers because my teenage years were not much to get excited about. For a while I managed an NGO. I am always writing for magazines, radio stations and sometimes for free.

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