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| Photograph by Victor Englebert |
I tagged him
like a suitcase
in our wedding henna
and the indigo of our gods
so sand and salt water could not erase him
using a hand-rolled cone
of discarded plastic
I labeled him in Arabic on his forehead
with the translated love poems of Rumi
riding across the arch of each eyebrow
I braided his eyelashes into a wind rose
to inform a faltering will
where grace blew the hardest
I pierced his ears with Voltaire’s call
to give ourselves
the gift
of living well
on the palms of his hands, I rendered
in sloppy English,
the poetry of lorde and knight
between the nervous Dogon masks that dressed his breasts
and the hairy lotus flowers that framed a navel I loved to
get lost in
I sung in the double swirl of earth’s only colors
a plea in Italian to be kind
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| A boat carrying migrants headed to Italy/Photograph by Massimo Sestini |
amid the spiraling canals of Sundiata’s praise song
that ran up and down his legs, front and back
I marked the empty spaces with the tattooed kisses
Of his children and a p.o. box leading back to Kolokani
on his stained fingernails I wrote our love dreams
-you know –a quartered-filled belly of lamb and hibiscus,
a muted chest,
feces that is thick and whole and free of the world’s
disdain,
a means of stretching our children with ideas -
I wrote this in Bambara because it glows in the dark
because it can lift a diminishing resolve from the clutches
of a cold night desert
and even dance on death’s imminent arrival
in the middle of a beautiful sea that will reject him
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| This man was travelling on a boat that sank off the coast of Libya headed for Italy . AFP/Getty Images |
disguised as a lullaby
to remind him
at the moment he is embraced
in a wet, frothy death hug
that this failure is not his
it is not his
it belongs to those who will rescue his body
Wow! So moving, so ancient and new.
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