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Yusef Salaam, "Somewhere Nowhere" (poem)

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

I was there when the poem glowed in the poet. A North Star glint in her eyes from Bolivia to across Canada border. Fugitives grinding onward under roots and shadows of leaves. Refusing to be made lumber for plantation porches & dining tables.

I was there when the poem lifted the poet To grayish blue clouds of confusion & clarity. A sacred & scared hallucinatory vision. Out there. Somewhere. Nowhere.

Santa Fe Literary Review 19

20 Volume 16 • 2021

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