GATHERING OF SPIRITS Gathering of Spirits by Umar Abubakar Sidi From the Poetry Book: Like Butterflies Scattered About by Art Rascals (2022) In 1944, during my first trip to Cuba, as a child I observed that different orders of reality appear to disturb the dreams beset by the Orisha and ancestral spirits of African origin A painter may create a secret order of things where different strokes suggest a gathering of masks and spirit animals Ancestral spirits do not accept ritual & magic expressed in hallucinating forms scattered on a canvas Fseudo-African prophets masquerading as art critics & scholars of voodoo art are distinguished by their power to surprise to synthesise different mediums of dreams this experience is widened by the violent reaction of man to the unconscious garden beset by spirit animals Religious satire in Chronicles of the Orisha captures a child being initiated into a dark order he is led by a figure wearing a mask in a haunted wood in Cuba, in 1944 a stature of a moon-headed female cast in bronze is charged with raw energy equivalent of ‘voodoo music for Cuban nightclubs” It is a world of ritual inhibited by the monstrous Orisha with a child Orisha with a child gathering around the unconscious garden beset by spirit animals Orisha with a child entering a spiritual halo Orisha with a child rotating the incandescent canvas painted by a poet hovering between native influences and post-modern eye Orisha with a child cannot be depicted on a canvas Orisha with a child cannot be seen by a poet Orisha with a child the gathering of spirits is complete “Introducing Umar Abubakar Sidi, a poet, soldier, aviator, and author of Masobe’s first poetry collection “Like Butterflies Scattered About By Art Rascals”  Umar Abubakar Sidi is a helicopter pilot with the Nigerian Navy. He attended the prestigious Nigerian Military School, Zaria and the Nigerian Defence Academy, Kaduna. He is the author of the poetry collection The Poet of Dust. (KonyaShamsRumi, 2019), and Like Butterflies Scattered About by Art Rascals ( Masobe, 2022). Sidi’s work is majorly premised on the exploration of the body, soul and spirit from Sufi and Surrealist perspectives. His works have appeared in Brittle Paper, Transition Magazine, Jalada, Saraba Magazine and elsewhere..   Umar Sidi’s work is majorly premised on the exploration of the body, soul and spirit from Sufi and Surrealist perspectives. His works have appeared in Brittle Paper, Transition Magazine, Jalada, Saraba Magazine, and many reputable blogs and news outlets locally and globally. He lives in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Umar Abubakar Sidi is magical, unpretentious and radical in his conceptualization of poetry. It celebrates the allure of the poem. It equally teaches, elicits and mocks the philistine inquisitor. Through the employment of different poetic forms and styles such as allusion, lyric, metaphor, imagery, allegory, symbolism, witticism, amplified by a sturdy narrative technique that sometimes calls to mind elegant prose, The Poet of Dust manifests varied influences drawing largely from Arabic, His second poetry collection, THE POET OF DUST is due Febraury, 2023.