THE ONLY FOREIGN AID MY MOTHER EVER WANTED WAS SAFETY
after the four Congo refugees who died when their overloaded canoe capsized in Lake Albert, with lines borrowed from Kristin Chang’s “Poem for an Immigrant’s Daughter”
i kneel in the hairline light of exile & home. no one leaves home
if the ocean will swallow them up. strange how sitting in a truck at the Sebagoro landing site on Lake
Albert shoreline means peace. yesterday
my mother ate her own appendix in a Ugandan bound pirogue. not
because hunger makes you whole but because there
is a name for grief to grow into. i come from a small world—a lifted paragraph from one of the worst conflict displacement affected shit holes. i understand the need to
define as a need for hope. In Uturi, my relatives are dying;
not because they are Hema or Bagagere, but because
they share the same land with minerals. once this
highland was our birthplace. once we were birds carrying the sky
into night. now i wake to red sand & follow a trail of enmity & blood.
* * *
on the side of a road in Kasia province, a woman’s abandoned luggage
& a suitcase spilling out music CDs. what happened
to the woman? why is the case open? did she manage
to run away?
—from Poets Respond
__________
Ojo Taiye: “A recent wave of targeted attacks has left a trail of death, destruction, and mass displacement in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s northeastern province of Ituri. The above poem is a sort of requiem for the symposium of endangered stars evicted to the water.”
