GATHERING OF SPIRITS

Gathering of Spirits by Umar Abubakar Sidi

From the Poetry Book: Like Butterflies Scattered About by Art Rascals (2022)

In 1944, during my first trip to Cuba, as a child

I observed that different orders of reality

appear to disturb the dreams beset

by the Orisha and ancestral spirits of African origin

A painter may create a secret order of things

where different strokes suggest a gathering

of masks and spirit animals

Ancestral spirits

do not accept ritual & magic

expressed in hallucinating forms

scattered on a canvas

Fseudo-African prophets masquerading

as art critics & scholars of voodoo art

are distinguished by their power to surprise

to synthesise different mediums of dreams

this experience is widened by the violent reaction of

man

to the unconscious garden beset by spirit animals

Religious satire in Chronicles of the Orisha

captures a child being initiated into a dark order

he is led by a figure wearing a mask

in a haunted wood in Cuba, in 1944

a stature of a moon-headed female cast in bronze

is charged with raw energy equivalent of ‘voodoo music

for Cuban nightclubs”

It is a world of ritual inhibited by the monstrous

Orisha with a child

Orisha with a child gathering around the unconscious

garden beset by spirit animals

Orisha with a child entering a spiritual halo

Orisha with a child rotating the incandescent canvas

painted by a poet hovering between native influences and

post-modern eye

Orisha with a child cannot be depicted on a canvas

Orisha with a child cannot be seen by a poet

Orisha with a child

the gathering of spirits is complete

“Introducing Umar Abubakar Sidi, a poet, soldier, aviator, and author of Masobe’s first poetry collection “Like Butterflies Scattered About By Art Rascals” 

Umar Abubakar Sidi is a helicopter pilot with the Nigerian Navy. He attended the prestigious Nigerian Military School, Zaria and the Nigerian Defence Academy, Kaduna. He is the author of the poetry collection The Poet of Dust. (KonyaShamsRumi, 2019), and Like Butterflies Scattered About by Art Rascals ( Masobe, 2022). Sidi’s work is majorly premised on the exploration of the body, soul and spirit from Sufi and Surrealist perspectives. His works have appeared in Brittle Paper, Transition Magazine, Jalada, Saraba Magazine and elsewhere..  

Umar Sidi’s work is majorly premised on the exploration of the body, soul and spirit from Sufi and Surrealist perspectives.  His works have appeared in Brittle Paper, Transition Magazine, Jalada, Saraba Magazine, and many reputable blogs and news outlets locally and globally. He lives in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Umar Abubakar Sidi is magical, unpretentious and radical in his conceptualization of poetry. It celebrates the allure of the poem. It equally teaches, elicits and mocks the philistine inquisitor. Through the employment of different poetic forms and styles such as allusion, lyric, metaphor, imagery, allegory, symbolism, witticism, amplified by a sturdy narrative technique that sometimes calls to mind elegant prose, The Poet of Dust manifests varied influences drawing largely from Arabic, His second poetry collection, THE POET OF DUST is due Febraury, 2023.