“The answer I got was the dream. That dream, a cherished ambition, becomes a kind of symbiosis connection between my grandfather and me.”
The Dreams of Grandfather and Me
1.
That morning, I opened the front door
and realized what is lost becomes a ghost.
Two cats watched the world from an extended
roof below my windows, and I saw them
as bodies lying down in want of what
is lost at the beginning of my broken past.
That morning, I crossed the waters,
and I found bones of birds that couldn’t
carry my body across the puddles
of water on the pavement. I have become
a ghost, moving on the face of the body
of water and couldn’t find my face in the surface,
every drop I tried to fold into an ocean of longing,
riding a horse underwater to meet my grandfather
who was waiting for me in the belly of yesterday.
2.
My dreams are carved in the ìyáàlù bàtá drums,
the carver of my future, and of my grandfather’s
dream. I have the eyes of the owl and I see
how my grandfather’s grave opens its mouth
to swallow my glory. I know things like
my grandmother’s cat touring the town at night,
seeking the secret of the woodcarver. My roots are
planted in the dreams of my grandfather, guided
by our ancestral spirit found in the melody
of the ìyáàlù bàtá drums hung on the nail
in our corridor’s walls in Tede. I’m the stem
of my family tree, and I turn into the face
of my grandfather as a soldier
in the Nigeria-Biafra war. My grandfather
becomes a fallen fruit after the war, and I’m
the ghost of his roots, touring the underwater,
to find the door to my broken castle of bone.
This poem has a two-part or diptych type structure. Did the two parts come together and separately and when did you realise that they were two halves of the same poem?
The poem’s first part was inspired by a picture of two cats at the window of a house. The first part is my response to the image. The first two stanzas of the poem are a description of the surroundings of the image. My imagination takes over the poem in the subsequent stanzas of the poem’s first part, leading me to the mysterious atmosphere that permeates the entire poem. I had the first part of the poem for at least a month but something within me was saying the poem wasn’t finished. But I didn’t know how to continue the poem. The image of “underwater” in the first stanza triggered me to start with the idea of a dream in the second stanza. I asked myself: “What happened before the underwater experience with your grandfather?” The answer I got was the dream. That dream, a cherished ambition, becomes a kind of symbiosis connection between my grandfather and me. This symbiosis connection is rooted in our traditional drum-ìyáàlù bàtá-the general insignia of my ancestral family. I grounded the second stanza in the dream-both physical and metaphysical, spicing it with the lived reality of my grandfather, who fought as a soldier in the Nigeria-Biafra civil war.
I like how you use tercets here and the way that the lines sometimes extend across stanzas, but you use a couplet in the final stanza. Could you talk a bit about how you choose verse forms?
I use the tercets in many of my poems because it allows me to breathe as I read through the poem, especially during my revision, and over time it has worked for me. Also, the tercets give me clarity, that is, I easily see which image is working and which isn’t as the lines run through each of the stanzas. Also, I believe in the trinitarian God, and that has somehow found a way into the arrangement of my poems on the page. Perhaps, just as many of my poems in the manuscript I am working on, the spiritual has found a way into my choice of tercets. The couplet at the end of the poem is intentional, too, and it serves as a form of finality to the poem, and perhaps, too, the poem makes its own choice intuitively, to end as a couplet.
To what extent is the grandfather in the poem real or imagined, or is the figure a mixture of both?
The grandfather in the poem is both real and imagined, the image of my grandfather is a mixed bag of the past and the future. I’m his future, he is my past, and my father which is absent in this poem but present in my other poems is his present. It is real in terms of the cultural and historical heritage that connect me with him, but it is imagined in terms of the metaphysical images in the poem. But these, real and imagined are combined to form symbiosis connections between us.
It is so refreshing to talk about this poem and writing the poem has been a wonderful journey for me.
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé (he/him/his) is from Tede, Nigeria. He is a third-year M.F.A. candidate at Florida State University and has received an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Lagos, Nigeria. His poetry is a semi-finalist for the 2024 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Poetry, the Wisconsin Poetry Series’ Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes, and the 2023 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. His work has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net, three times. His recent work is published or forthcoming in Harvard University’s Transition, Beloit Poetry Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Texas Review, The Los Angeles Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Another Chicago Magazine, The South Carolina Review, Moon City Review, The McNeese Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, Rattle, Verse Daily, Shift: A Journal of Literary Oddities, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
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