Your body is a house of god. Or a collection of boys. By Mbanefo Chibuike

1/4/2021

Your body is a house of god. Or a collection of boys.
By Mbanefo Chibuike

& you were twelve when a boy first called you baby -
& you ran into the eye of the night. Your body learns
how to hold names on Fridays and whip them into
the confession box two days later. Your body wishes
coyness isn't flirtatious - how a house of god is a good girl
& a bad girl is a collection of boys. But Handel's Hallelujah
is a god’s song you hum before giving a lover this body.
The first time you picked pieces of your heart, ducking
on your tears, your fingers wandered towards your vulva
& you watched the emptiness fill you. Mother could be right -

a girl's body is a way into suffering /and shadow of a god,
it reminds you how pain and pleasure pass in a funeral
& what everyone says about a woman being "too sexual."
In the church, a priest drums into brittle walls,
the dangers of promiscuity /and his tone
betrays your frustration, your body is unlearning shyness
& there's no canvas to paint the beauty of sex.
But you cannot continue to hide your desires on cold nights
so that a husband calls you chaste /and your body falls
into the house of this god while he's into another woman's.
You choose to express yourself for what you couldn't
remember is broken - the satisfaction or sin - /and the pieces
of boys flung into your lips on the altar of a god & society.

Read More about the Author Here - www.nigerianwriters.info/mbanefo-chibuike

11 Comments

Jesutobiloba

6/4/2021 07:14:55 am

This is a beautiful piece as well. It vividly highlights the struggle women face to keep their bodies ‘holy’, our bodies are a lot of things, house a lot of things, is capable of making us feel a lot of things. This topic is grossly unexplored as well.
Although were the words written this way intentionally?
Abbreviated, small letters starting sentences
Makes it a little difficult to read.
Thank you for sharing Chibuike

Oluwatumininu Adekunle

6/4/2021 07:33:08 am

"How a house of god is a good girl & a bad girl is a collection of boys"
" a girl's body is a way into suffering /and shadow of a god,
it reminds you how pain and pleasure pass in a funeral"

Splendid and beautiful is not enough to describe the beauty that radiates over this art piece. It reminds me a lot of growing up in Nigeria as a woman. A woman taught to treasure her virginity - her worth - yet she doesn't even understand her own anatomy. A woman who is taught to feel complete only when she is with a man. She is shy. Naive. Modest. But when a discovery called relationship hits her, real hard it could break her, she becomes daring, ready to explore,she can't get enough of this new life -an eye opener, she believes, yet every night, she can't help but feel like a broken record. She doesn't know when to stop
No. She can't stop. She has no definition of who she is outside of this life. So she does what she can do best. Offer herself again and again.

Thank you for this, Chibuike. It was such a good read.

Ojo Olumide Emmanuel

6/4/2021 06:57:39 pm

The peak of this work is "choice."
This poem is a story retold using poetic allusion to church as symbolic of prescriptive rules for acceptable consummation and the society as the watchmen over the norms and conventions on sexuality as consciously agreed by members of a community. Should a girl explore sex will restraint or obeying these rules of acceptability? This is the speculation of this poem.
The girl/woman should be a custodian of her body and sometimes to dictate rules on how she should respond to her hormone is what the science of the body doesn't understand.
This work is a good one and there's so much dimensions to the poem beyond just sex. The work is an indictment to some extent of the sheer pretense of everyone. People pretend they desire sex yet if the door is flung open, the thought of what may happen can only be imagined.

EmePeter

7/4/2021 07:08:02 pm

The piece is explicitly written.
You would bet that he spelt out what the female gender goes through on a daily basis

Damilola Omotoyinbo link

9/4/2021 03:55:16 pm

This is what most females go through in our society. Society tells them who to be and they feel so different. If you are bold enough to question their beliefs they call you wayward. More room is given to the man to be what so ever. Society even supports his promiscuity, they say that's what nature wants him to be. Tell me, how?

Mustapha Enesi

10/4/2021 08:20:11 am

What drew my attention the most was the use of really good metaphors.
‘& you ran into the eye of the night.’ Paints vivid pictures of what a reader should imagine, paints the humility teenage girls ar expected to have.
‘it reminds you how pain and pleasure pass in a funeral...’ this is another strong metaphor that won me over. It guides one into the kind of emotion that should be felt.

However, the poem explores a social issue that’s rarely explored; the girl child and the expected gender roles both from the society and the church and how they are expected to live within those confines till they are no more. It captures the life of the girl child in very simple sentences that I find alluring, starting from their lives as teenagers till they are married and what comes after.

On this note, I’m do not know what could have been done better, maybe if I were a poet or some literature proffesor I would have said the rise and fall of the poem weren’t in perfect sync. But I am neither of those, so, I think it is a well crafted poem.

10/4/2021 11:28:22 am

What drew my attention the most was the use of really good metaphors.
‘& you ran into the eye of the night.’ Paints vivid pictures of what a reader should imagine, paints the humility teenage girls are expected to have.
‘it reminds you how pain and pleasure pass in a funeral...’ this is another strong metaphor that won me over. It guides one into the kind of emotion that should be felt.

However, the poem explores a social issue that’s rarely explored; the girl child and the expected gender roles both from the society and the church and how they are expected to live within those confines till they are no more. It captures the life of the girl child in very simple sentences that I find alluring, starting from their lives as teenagers till they are married and what comes after.

I do not know what could have been done better, maybe if I were a poet or some literature proffesor I would have said the rise and fall of the poem’s tone weren’t in perfect sync. But I am neither of those, so, I think it is a well crafted poem.

Ambassador Daniel Amakor

10/4/2021 04:55:26 pm

There's actually no canvas that can ever in a very detailed detail, paint the beautiful picture of sex.

I love this piece
It's well thought out.
I will love to connect with the poet

Odafe

16/4/2021 05:15:05 pm

Brave, sensitive, grasping ... All, words fit - yet hardly enough - to describe Mbanefo Chibuike's artistry.

In this poem he remarks a girl (the listener, or reader herewith) carefully split into two by the warring factions for and against the pangs of sexual desires both within and without her, while hinting at the nonsensical nature of this rift.

The poet, in this deeply accentuated literary work captures a radically innate portion of her struggle in these lines;

In the church, a priest drums into brittle walls,
the dangers of promiscuity /and his tone betrays your frustration, your body is unlearning
shyness
& there's no canvas to paint the beauty of sex

It begins with a deep plunge so that we can almost hear it break the silence in the room with its first line and how unconventionally it reads (or sings; imbibing its musicality)

However, it is Mbanefo's choice of pronoun that captivates in how it paints a mirror for the rest of us (assuming we are not the subject of this matter) to see more vividly and evaluate the outer compressions and inner expansions that keep or drive us.

Undoubtedly, it is a poem to be received at worst with a humming ovation for how direly close it brings us to a dilemma we would rather not encounter and at best in silence, for how deeply it shoves the fickle constructs of society down our throats.

Despite itself, Mbanefo Chibuike, in this poem, leave us no room for double-mindedness.

Tammy

17/4/2021 06:15:19 pm

The poem is derivative and uninspired. It feels like any of the myriad of words about how religion suppresses female sexuality and how sex completes a woman.

What is most off-putting to me as a woman is the fact that this is written by a man assuming the voice of a woman. Keeping in mind the fact that women always get the wrong end of the sexual stick, be it an unplanned pregnancy or an sti.

The writer might want to work on his language, it feels clipped and recycled. The way the poem is structured also lends to it's overall unreadability. With time and more practice I believe the writer can get better and produce more believable narratives.

Ajayi Solomon

18/4/2021 02:03:48 pm

This is a story told poetically,

The choice of words are great, Everything about this piece is unique

From the narration of a female feeling and experience in the society.

God bless you chibuike for this piece.

Your body is a house of god. Or a collection of boys. By Mbanefo Chibuike

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Copyright @SprinNG

Your body is a house of god. Or a collection of boys. By Mbanefo Chibuike

Leave a Reply.

Copyright @SprinNG​

Copyright @SprinNG