{"id":633,"date":"2021-01-14T14:22:52","date_gmt":"2021-01-14T14:22:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ifeomaonyefulu.co.uk\/mytravels\/?p=633"},"modified":"2021-01-16T12:48:48","modified_gmt":"2021-01-16T12:48:48","slug":"sing-me-a-song-ma-a-story-of-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ifeomaonyefulu.co.uk\/mytravels\/?p=633","title":{"rendered":"Sing Me A Song, Ma – a story of poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"
Send to Kindle<\/span><\/div>

If anyone had told me I would be writing poems in 2020, I would have laughed at them. But in January last year something strange happened, I began to get requests from schools to do poetry workshops, and no sooner had I said no to one school another one would pop up like a jack-in-box toy. I had never written a poem in my life, and that was the strangest thing. Then, two days before I was due to travel to Scotland to do a writing workshop for a school, I was asked again.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"image<\/a>

Banana trees – I write about them in my poetry…<\/p><\/div>\n

I will gladly have done a workshop on writing plays, if such a thing exists in schools, because of No Water in The Jungle<\/em><\/a>, one of my plays, staged in London in 2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyway, I had a decision to make pretty fast, and it was not going to be easy to say no to the school, with two days to go. What\u2019s more, we, the school, and I had spent months corresponding, and setting up the timetable, and I was to do the assembly, too. <\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, I rang a friend for some moral support, and she chuckled, \u2018But when I read your books, I think of poetry\u2026 it is the way you write,\u2019 she said breezily.<\/span><\/p>\n

Poetry – that word again.<\/span><\/p>\n

I decided to stick with the timetable and do the workshop as initially planned.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, as I was wondering how I was going to compose an upbeat email to the school about my decision, my eyes somehow wandered off and settled a photograph on the far end of the wall. It was a picture of a Fulani woman I took years ago in northern Nigeria; she was dressed in bright clothes and had beads on her hair. After staring at it for what seemed like hours but was only a few seconds I heard a voice in my head about a girl who liked many colours but would only wear blue when she went to see her grandma. Why? Was it because she liked blue or because her grandma liked blue?<\/span><\/p>\n

I grabbed a pencil and paper and began writing. I didn\u2019t know if it was going to be a short story or not, but I remember reading it back, and it felt like a poem with sprinkles of intensity and imagery, which surprised me a lot. <\/span><\/p>\n

So, I wrote and wrote, I was very thankful I had something to do during the first Lockdown, and that was how I came to write my first poem titled <\/span>What are Colours to Adaora!<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Then, I wanted to write more poems children would enjoy, as much as I enjoyed the stories our mother and sometimes our grandfather told my siblings and me when we were children in Nigeria.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Sing<\/a>

See the e-book here…<\/p><\/div>\n

In December 2020, I published some of the poems<\/a> online, as a collection, titled <\/span>Sing Me a Song, Ma<\/i><\/span>. <\/span><\/p>\n

Two of the poems, especially <\/span>Grandma\u2019s Tree<\/i><\/span>, are about nature, and the way we treat our trees. It was inspired by a conversation I had with our late mother about her favourite avocado tree, which didn\u2019t produce any fruits for a long time. <\/span><\/p>\n

Another poem, <\/span>Rain<\/i><\/span>, is about water shortage, people in low-income countries often struggle to get enough water. During the dry season, when rainfall was rare, we bought water from a well, but in the raining season, we saved enough rainwater for cooking and washing, which lasted for several days.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, some of the poems are lighthearted, for example, <\/span>Sing Me a Song, Ma<\/i><\/span>, is about a child who doesn\u2019t want to go to sleep, so she comes up with a brilliant way of staying awake by getting her mother to sing her song, \u201cA song that will make my eyes wake up and\u2026. A song that will make me dance.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, I hope <\/span>Sing Me a Song, Ma<\/i><\/span>, will be an e-book for children and their families to read aloud together.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ifeoma Onyefulu<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If anyone had told me I would be writing poems in 2020, I would have laughed at them. But in January last year something strange happened, I began to get requests from schools to do poetry workshops, and no sooner had I said no to one school another one would pop up like… <\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[19,73,63,4],"tags":[25,72,8,74,75],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5zNen-ad","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ifeomaonyefulu.co.uk\/mytravels\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ifeomaonyefulu.co.uk\/mytravels\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ifeomaonyefulu.co.uk\/mytravels\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ifeomaonyefulu.co.uk\/mytravels\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ifeomaonyefulu.co.uk\/mytravels\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.ifeomaonyefulu.co.uk\/mytravels\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ifeomaonyefulu.co.uk\/mytravels\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ifeomaonyefulu.co.uk\/mytravels\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ifeomaonyefulu.co.uk\/mytravels\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}