The words of Peter Akinwunmi (Peter Ak'i)Childhood, life and passions.
NO CONTEST. Sunday after Sunday we trod the way, familiar past the point of boredom. The way led to the House of God. Ten, twenty, thirty children, all under sixteen marched as prisoners to sing and listen to Jesus, who never answered our prayers for a mum and dad to care, or to care for. […]
At my conception music was embroidered into my soul. A tapestry rich in rhythm is woven through me threading in and around guts and knitting bone and blood to spirit. There-from, a wellspring of inspiration fizzes continuously like a fuse wire buzzing toward its dynamite. Thrilling, ragged rock is stitched into me, mending frayed membranes; […]
Once upon a romance in the crackle of a recordI listened for the faces butsaw – only gaps and spaces.I rubbed my eyes in wonder,afraid to snuggle under just in case I felt the touch of Mr Death. Once upon a headache on a carousel of jestersI looked through ancient rubric butit tasted stale and […]
There comes a point when memory feels less like looking back and more like standing among ghosts who never truly left. This poem turns toward them with recognition (not grief) tracing the faint, eternal gestures between those who go and those who remain. It is about the quiet grace of waving, and still feeling the […]
Words: meaning, expression and reception; each unique and intimate. Mere units with which to communicate? Lexical devices? Verbal instruments? Creative inventions? Companions! Mates that are with me, ever ready to assist with my curiosities and relationships. Words to think, murmur, sing and holler, dimensions and features as distinct as colour, as definite as stones yet […]
Introduction Introduction: There are some truths I didn’t know how to speak for decades. Even now, I approach them with reverence and a bit of fear. They are too sharp for easy telling. Too close to the bone for polite memoir. But somewhere between memory and poetry, I found a voice that could say what […]
PART I. I stumbled through a childhood drunk on woe.Like a bagatelle ball flipped there and here.And into a void of thirty years or soI’d poured gravel, sand, garbage and tears. The emptiness stayed hollow,though it resounded just enoughto convince those who would followinside was interesting stuff. Nothing that entered that space of spaceever stayed […]
Banana Boy (Edited Version) Ssad tales or success stories? Here they’re two sides of the same view. Our childhoods aren’t a choice, but how we carry it is. Being a Barnardo’s boy, an accident of empire. I grew up as a lonely kid, surrounded by children in a giant echoing house. But I and my […]
GRASPING THE NETTLE. Five years old, suddenly alone; in a Childrens’ Home.He was cared for, as one of manywhich crushed and confused his identityand meant a little boy grew, without self-value. Eight years later and his mind is full ofself-loathing imaginings intertwined like bramble.Dispiriting thoughts, tangled; like the curls on his head,as if tousled and […]
I was born in Cardiff in 1951. At 5 years old I was taken from my mother, to live in a Dr. Barnardo’s Childrens’ Home in Cardiff. Later, aged 9, I was transferred to a Home in Aberdare, where I lived until I was 16. However while in Cardiff (just prior to Christmas 1957) a […]
The words of Peter Akinwunmi (Peter Ak'i)