This was an intersection of visual art and poetry. Poetry in response to Ismail’s exhibition at Efie Gallery, Beyond the Fence Begins the Sky.
The fusion of this poetry in text and audio serves as the artistic contextual expression of these figures in the art and speaks of how the art interprets itself before the poet. The concept of expressing one’s experiences is subject to an arrangement–a narrative rooted in modern society; so this interdisciplinary art wants listeners to be conscious of the little identity stereotypes they cannot see–and help us be understood in the unexpected times and trying moments.
The poems were created through the grotesqueness and penetrating gaze of merely human beings, experiencing, surviving, and wrestling with the same emotions, pain, happiness, sadness, and despair experienced worldwide.
Beyond the Fence Begins the Sky by Isshaq Ismail.
Poetry: Land of hope and Favour
The beginning
Everyone was expecting you at the village square
To call your clothed name from dreams–
And across roads of unknown fate
They never prepared to tell you
before the season of your time
How on this land of hope and favour
Life courageously ends at birth
And only begins from our infant tears
They never tell you, on earth
We slash hot pepper in old wounds
To teach our future scars how to embrace healing
No one comes whispering
Of mountains still to quell on high hills
And rivers there many you have to ford
Grotesque, but you are here
And I was expecting you
if tears come and gather you through your eyes
I hope they teach you how to see
That deserts too have blue rivers, maybe
Not only through poems
but you are here
And I was expecting you