Atonement is an expression of my thoughts towards what I have been going through with life, her coming, and the other things that I am sometimes crying out that this is not how I have wanted my life with the modern union to be like. I had wanted understanding, love, and support from both parties in a relationship that has been able to bring two souls into this world but I am seen as the devil, hated, and if possible wish to be better dead if I am not mistaken it.

With taunting words and actions from the one I call lover and her siblings just for the fact that I am vulnerable to love and respect for humanity at large, I love being plain and simple all the time, but I am being mistaken for idiocy and many other things that I can not even imagine how I get into it.

This collection of short poems, titled "21 Atonements" speaks to my daughter and my small life in this small world as I watch life unfolds in my experience of it.

I hope that this work brings to my little girl's heart what I was going through before her birth. The negligence, taunts, and dehumanising words that I am bathed in because I chose to answer her father and her brother as well. I hope that this collection will go into the world and help everyone going through a lot in this life, that they should go for what makes them happy and celebrate their little time in this world.

During the birth of my daughter that I was denied access to holding the womb that carried her to pray for her while she was still growing in the womb, these traumas and the circumstances surrounding her birth as well, they're the reason why I am writing this collection of poems and hope to heal from every one of these things and to live long enough to see her starts reading and perhaps she reads these words and know that I am a survivor and that she would see reasons to live a meaningful life on earth.

John Chinaka Onyeche
MTN Switch, No 1 Agudama D-Line
Port Harcourt, Rivers State
Date: 01/11/2022