ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Bola Opaleke is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. His poems have appeared or forthcoming in a few journals like Frontier Poetry, Rising Phoenix Review, Writers Resist, Rattle, Cleaver, One, The Nottingham Review, The Puritan, The Literary Review of Canada, Sierra Nevada Review, Dissident Voice, Poetry Quarterly, The Indianapolis Review, Canadian Literature, Empty Mirror, Poetry Pacific, Drunk Monkeys, Temz Review, The Pangolin Review, and others. He holds a degree in City Planning and lives in Winnipeg MB.
Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry:
A Pattern Too Familiar
Poets Resist
Edited by Kanika Lawton
June 30, 2019
Edited by Kanika Lawton
June 30, 2019
At the Border
Children — you’re not — the children
of this land who originally fell from the sky.
In our dreams, men & women were made
of pens & papers. When a language rushes in
to rescue those crumpled & in garbage bins, the words
of which their bones were made were
already broken inside their barbwire confinement.
You would answer any name we give to you
in this country. Because we are the people covered
in metal skin. Nothing here pinches us to remind the world
of historicity. On the shelves, the books —
dusty & abandoned; the ink in the pens becomes a rock.
Children who did not fall from the skies
just fell from the skies. They must neither brush
their teeth nor wash their bodies. The snort in their noses
is the rock in the pens. In our dreams,
when we looked at ourselves we cannot tell
who laughs or cries when we talk
about the death in other people’s backyards
because a legend says: Death is a messenger of God,
but then says, God does not send messages
of death. This is how we shrugged off the grief
that did not scream out our own names. Because it is
enough hard work to speak a language everyone understands.
We took the tears of these children, in our dreams,
and fed toy fishes with it in an aquarium
made entirely of southern vernaculars. Say to ourselves,
“some salt is not to be tasted”. In this country,
it is no one’s business if the law would not unbend
the heads of its makers; unbuild the walls & prison camps
that build nothing in return. Children — you’re
no more children. You’re the adults our country built.
Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
