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Happiness
My 13-year old daughter
reads Plato, becomes
a philosopher,
defines happiness:
Happiness is me
and my best friend
eating cherries
on my neighbour’s
porch (they have not
been home s ince
Christmas last
December so beside us
a dirty fig tree stands,
with broken hollies
like smaller cherries
among its leaves).
Happiness comes
like sunrays
on a cold morning,
like butterflies in the wild
like you, like the seven oceans
like nothing & everything.
End this poem here
If you love happy endings.
I do too, but sometimes
happiness takes me
to the edge of a grief
and leaves me there
hanging like a broken kite
in the limbo of a memory.
On the 12th of June, 1998
I found happiness
inside my Windsor hat
sailing the pacific
of the University air.
Valedictorian. The podium
& the plaque reminding me
of a void the shape of mother
so I am sand-winched
between the bosoms of a silhouette
waiting for a light in my heart.
Sometimes happiness is a scorching sun,
a brief snowstorm, a tempest.
About the Author
Timi Sanni is a Nigerian writer and literary enthusiast. His works have been published or are forthcoming in various literary journals like Radical Art Review, African Writers, Rather Quiet, Praxis Magazine and elsewhere.
He recently won the SprinNG Poetry Contest and is the recipient of the Fitrah Review Prize for Fiction 2020. He is an editor at Kalopsia lit and Upwrite magazine.
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