WARDAH ABASS

Time Ferry

The boat of time is a small, broken thing.

It carries me backward

through the thick, grey silt of years—

past midwives with bloodied aprons

collecting the new,

past the gleaming chrome of 70s Volkswagens

dying in the amber light

of a Lagos that was still breathing.

The landscape is a wide, sparse ache—

trees whizzing by like ghosts,

men in grey uniforms,

afros swaying like heavy flowers

in a memory I was never invited to.

The wind rushes me toward Áfàáké.

This is the land that first held my father.

The boat docks,

its hull scraping against a shore

that tastes of salt and ancient grief.

I step out into a world

that is both my own blood

and a total stranger.

There he is. My father.

He is five years old and made of silence.

He sits alone, his eyes

two vacant rooms

where the lights have been blown out.

I stand transfixed.

I hear the evening air thick

with the names of children—

other mothers calling their sons home

for dinner, for bathing, for love.

But there is no voice for him.

No hand to smooth the dust from his forehead.

He is a small, abandoned country.

I walk toward him,

but I am made of mist.

He does not look up.

Memory is a knot

that refuses to be pulled straight.

I stare into his eyes,

aching to reach into the clock

and break its teeth,

to rewrite the hunger out of his belly

so the present wouldn't taste

so much like gall.

But time is a cruel, unforgiving thing.

I cannot change the boy,

but I can look at the man he became

and see the hole

where the mercy should have been.

In this moment,

forgiveness is not a gift I give him—

it is a flood that washes me clean.

Because no child deserves a world

that forgets to say their name.

Wardah Abbas is a Nigerian lawyer, essayist, poet, and multidimensional creative. Her work explores the intersections of personal identity, cultural critique, and gender justice. She has previously been published in AARP, The Republic, Human Parts and elsewhere.