Hassan Ismail Adekunle is a Nigerian poet, journalist, and creative writer whose work explores the human condition through memory, love, loss, society, and the fragile architecture of hope. A graduate of Political Science from Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto, his writings have appeared in Brittle Paper, Borderless Journal, Eunoia Review, The Nation, TheCable, The Hooghly Review, Kalahari Review, and other literary platforms. More poetry from The Feedsack is here.
After the Generator Goes Quiet
When the generator stops, the compound becomes a listening room.
A baby cries behind the next wall. Someone curses the fuel seller. A woman fans herself with an old calendar whose months have outlived their usefulness.
In the darkness, our separate rooms begin to resemble one another. The landlord’s son and the apprentice, the graduate without a job and the man who has stopped looking, all lie awake beneath the same heat.
Earlier, the generator had swallowed the evening’s smaller sounds: the scrape of a pot, the call to prayer from a distant mosque, my neighbour rehearsing an apology he may never deliver.
Now every sound returns.
A spoon falls. A gate complains. Someone laughs at something on a phone before the battery dies.
I remember my father saying that a house is built with cement, but a home is built with patience. He said this while repairing a roof that leaked whenever it rained.
I did not understand him then. I thought home meant having enough: enough light to read, enough money to plan a journey, enough peace to sleep without counting the things that might go wrong.
But here we are, sharing darkness without having agreed to share anything.
A neighbour knocks to borrow a candle. Another offers matches. From somewhere, a child begins to sing.
And for a little while, before the electricity returns and the machines reclaim the night, we discover what the noise had been keeping from us:
we were never alone in the dark.
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