YUSEF SALAAM |
SOMEWHERE NOWHERE
Don’t shop for a poem. There are no cage-free or certified organic inscriptions like on a carton of eggs. No aisles to saunter & purchase a washing powder poem. Or a verse for dessert. A poem lights on your heart like a gentle breath of air. Don’t visit a park looking for a poem. Musing squirrels hoisted on hind legs smiling & chewing acorns. Yielding your ears to the ballads of birds. Or ogling the grandeur of a Giant Oak. The most meditative poem alights on a mother as she feeds baby her breast. I saw a poem composing on a poet’s spirit. Her eyes gazed glazed out to somewhere nowhere. A glorious twinkling of radiance explored triple darkness. A seed inseminated & a poem bloomed from the womb. I saw the poem resonate on her face. She stared out the window of a train bound for Vienna. A blurry of trees flashed. Heads drooped & heads held high. Logs locked in boxcars. Shipped to somewhere nowhere. I heard her poem weep profusely. Railroad tracks of bodies nailed across mud of the Atlantic. Timber tossed into furnaces. Fruitless Evergreens in barbwire forests. Wood, iron, & steel battling in Gettysburg & Normandy. I tasted the sour salt of the woman’s poem. The puke of obliged sterility. 1/8 of a Cedar in a Pine makes it a Cedar. The Lemon Tree will defile the Fig Tree.
18
Volume 16 • 2021
