To die is to return To fly is to be a bird’s heart Neither is freedom — Chris Abani 1 Instead of flowers, send me something that doesn’t die To watch the rainbow of beauty slither into the dark of my skin, is a shackle. A bundle of roses bound has no choice To live or wither. And most days I bleed into the nightfall & even the moon Is hiding from me behind water. Look there is a tear or maybe a song or it is just my mother’s voice crooked hitting the rocks Like waves trying to carve a road for me & I cannot be thankful enough Cannot kiss the valley between her knuckles enough. 2 A firefly dances inside a bottle while her sister dies fleeing In her mind, death is a shackle she has escaped & she knows the glass Cannot hold for ever She knows there is no need bothering God with prayers He will not answer This is a circle song: she goes over the same field again, into the snare Of a little child, just so she has a story to tell her young. Some call it history, but there is no use calling it past if the future is just the same I call it prophecy. 3 I sculpt a castle in my mind so there will be a prison That yearns for me . A shackle that loves me enough not to let go. I feel the failed astonishment of every butterfly that falters in the fluttering of dying wings. Our dead have died like fires: first flame then smoke Then the wind eloping with each ash leaving no trace Black lines unweave themselves, hover over trees. I pass through The whirl to pluck a bit of memory, another way to shackle myself To those who had chosen to be free. 4 Home too says ‘you must love all that live within' Says ‘you must return’. But the house is nothing but a house A nest where an old pain looms in every drawer and weeps Off every wall, in the shadows asking ‘where did the light go? Why did it flee?’ Asking why the moon washes itself clean of this place, free like a refugee among trees Asking why a nomad's home is so used to emptiness it unravels at night? Wind. To die is to return. Home says I must, preparing a table for me To fly is to be a bird’s heart. I choose this. Neither is freedom But to fly is to embrace the skies The other is just a place to die in.

Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
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