Poetry by Eileen Gbagbo
On a 5 minute voice note on Whatsapp
My father is praying for me
Blessings, holy fire on my enemies –
I miss the beat to say [ ]
Jehovah turn my life around
Jehovah turn my life around
Lately, I sit at the back of the church
Hoping no one catches my off-key wailing
It’s hard to pretend to believe
When the holy oil ran out before
It reached me, no bread to pass
to the back row, and the mic stopped working
Jehovah turn my life around
Jehovah turn my life around
(in harmony) Jehovah please lift me from the ground
Be saviour
Heal my broken claim to connection.
[ ]
I feel the aunties side eye me
When I mistime the [ ]
It’s hard to pretend to believe
I can ever be counted among the saints
After I stole a £5 note from the offering basket.
The economy was fucked up even then.
[ ]
There’s nothing like black people gathering
On a Sunday to make you remember that God lives
In the blackpentecostal [ ]
Jehovah turn my life around
Jehovah turn my life around
(in harmony) Jehovah please lift me from the ground
I believe in God the most when I lie:
To my parents, manager, the guy who wants
to know if i like it like that
I manufacture the outpouring of my spirit and leave
When the doors open.
i don’t say the final [ ]
I believe because I had no choice
I believe because [ ] is the sound of collective yearning.
The antithesis of silence
[ ]
BEYOND QUIET
In the not yet of grief,
I return to the hymns –
Open my grandmother’s Hadzihale
And stitch songs across my lips
Wrestling with a voice even god might ignore.
But I wait
And on the fourth day
Grief arrived when the griot took a vow of silence –
In the distance between hope and silence
between beats.
It arrived as chaos and stayed
Long enough to become a fuck you eulogy
It lived in the vibrations –
In the counter archive of history
It came from language born out of my father’s lies,
Arrived wearing a tattered dress stitched together by missed calls and blue ticked voicenotes
It remains in the stampede blackpentecostal choreography
IN PRAISE OF MY FATHER’S FAILED MUSIC CARREER
Every Sunday, my father plays Highlife
He is nostalgic for music before Afrobeats,
Before Detty December and whitewashed Sankofa –
A time where the two-step was not a dance
he dragged with him to work.
He says this genre put Ghana on the map.
He means, I would leave Accra
Again in search of this life I have given you.
I praise my broken immigrant dreams
I praise the moonlight for giving me
Half a music career
I praise the aunties for feeding my ambition
I praise the boys for giving me more time
I praise Broadwater Farm for the baptism of fire, and
I praise Queen and Country for these scars.
He dances to the guitar solo
My mother joins him when the trumpets come in
I praise my broken Twi when I join the chorus.
I praise my father for teaching me
The national anthem before a football game
I praise his CD collection and mislabeled mixtapes
I praise the hall parties he DJ-ed at
I praise the piano lessons I had as a child
I praise my father’s broken immigrant dreams
For feeding my ambition.
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Bio
Eileen Gbagbo is a spoken word artist, journalist and playwright based in London. She was highly commended in the Slambassadors competition, and an alumnus of the Apples and Snakes Writing Room programme. She has performed at various institutions including the Saatchi Gallery, Victoria & Albert Gallery, the BFI Southbank and The Albany as part of Apples and Snakes theatre show – Cece’s Speakeasy. She was part of the BORN:FREE poetry collective in 2024 and dedicated her practice to working across film and theatre through a decolonial lens. She was a Poet in Residence at the Cap and Cans exhibition in London’s Leake Street.
Originally published July 21, 2026