Poem of the Day
The People’s History of 1998
By Gbenga Adesina
The Yangtze River in China lost its nerve / and wanted vengeance.
The Yangtze River in China lost its nerve / and wanted vengeance.
I finger this vagabond cloth to numbness.
I can't even capture your hands
or what carries us limb by limb.
1. After years away I was back in London visiting a friend who lived in Kensington in one of those cheap council flats that in my day poor people like me fought for. He had a few people in; some I knew; some I didn’t. They sidled between the furniture and the stacked books. A bitter smell came from marigolds in a vase.
Smoking a cigarette in a classroom
a woman is copying sentences from
a book called Our American Way of Life
Are you listening? Mommy takes care of you.
She’s writing this letter with her pen dipped
in the milk her nipples won’t stop streaming
I have come often to this forest,
home to these never not green trees.
Now, in a grove of auburn bones
I watch like a praying mantis
In the dawn of the day of the world,
My fingers are knotted like bamboo-shoots,
Take back that look. Close the door
To that shuttered room.
The thought of what we left, forget.
Go lift that pane of moonlight from the floor
And tell Nicotiana to stop
Screaming with her perfume.
So I don’t think I’ll work today. Today it seems best
To let this bench hold my end up. Today
Of what my part was, brooding
Lifting his head from the paper he noticed her orange hair.