By Pete Cardinal Cox
Nisola Jegede’s Instructions for a Wet Morning is a sonnet that marries the elegance of form with the disorder of Lagos rainfall. It stages a remarkable negotiation: between the strict discipline of fourteen lines and the unruly vitality of a city that resists containment.
The poem is a choreography of senses. The opening—“Begin with feet that bless the flooded street, / let puddles mirror what the sky has lost”—anchors us immediately in a Lagos that is both a backdrop and a character. The hawker’s hum, the danfo’s cough, the bread’s warmth: each element is scored like a note in a restless symphony. Jegede’s triumph lies in her refusal to sentimentalize the city. Rain is not mere weather, but a ritual—defiant and unavoidable.
By choosing the sonnet, Jegede engages a Western literary tradition historically associated with love, philosophy, and ordered beauty. Yet, into this vessel she pours the diesel-stained, suya-smoked chaos of Lagos. The tension is palpable: the rhyme contains the flood, but the imagery threatens to spill over. This is where the poem’s artfulness resides—its ability to make us feel the pressure between form and freedom, tradition and improvisation.
The volta—the classic sonnet turn—arrives with the girl at Tafawa Balewa Square, whose raincoat “fits like longing.” She is an apparition, metaphor, emblem of resistance. Yet, she is also fragile: searching for a god who does not drown. In her, the city’s contradictions crystallize—its mixture of faith and fatigue, resilience and erosion.
The couplet, “So walk. The sky has reasons you can’t guess. / To be alone in rain is not distress,” brings meditative stillness to a poem charged with sensory noise. It is a philosophical bow, a Mary Oliver-like turn toward interiority, but one tempered by the blunt wisdom of Lagos survival.
The poem’s triumph lies in its ability to hold two worlds at once: the ornamental precision of the sonnet and the feral energy of the street. It is both lyrical and documentary, hymn and manual. If there is a limitation, it is that the neat closure risks softening the city’s jagged edges. Lagos does not end with couplets; it leaks, resists, insists. Yet perhaps this friction is the point—the impossibility of fully translating Lagos into any form, even the noble sonnet.
Instructions for a Wet Morning is a poem about rain; it is about survival, observation, and the ritual of walking through chaos with open eyes. Jegede proves that the sonnet can be remade as an urban vessel—that beauty can be coaxed from gutters, danfos, and dripping raincoats. The poem leaves us damp but clarified that the rain teaches a myriad of stupendous things in Lagos.
