Orchestra Immigrant and Saltbodies

in this picture, a refugee mother holds
what’s left of her child which is left of a tragic boat.
diaspora is an exodus of birds
filled with aching concerto of loss.
loss is a language every region speaks
but in different accents scattered
like dishwares over wooden floorboards.
on my tongue are churches where pews
are getting raped with bullets,
cities terrorized by bandits, Fulani herdsmen & IPOB.
elsewhere, there’s a woman standing by the roadside.
passerbys are telling her to take heart,
they give her flowers in place of her husband
who had gone to war & never rifled back.
under my faucet where algae once sprouted
are flooded wingspans of dhingies.
like you, i am also wondering how they got there.
i don’t know what the dead say underwater
but i am sure it is something rooted to the living.

i am singing a song that can only be born
after losing a country.

Joy Harjo

when salt meets water,
it becomes an ocean

when an ocean meets land,
it becomes a country

it takes a man to deny his country
uproot every lingo reminding
he belongs here, among a mass of homeless
boys
in the vagrant heart of Plateau.

stinking hospitals built for recluse
cathedrals where mass is an etymology
of the word massacre.

in Rio Grande, illegal bodies smuggled into cargoes
collected by the sinkhole sea

& who are minors if not children
pirouetting the strait of Gilbratar.

see, i have no love for this place
since losing homies to brutality,
countless odysseys, strangers washing tongues
into the sink after learning
there are several homes in this land
but none of them can be called a homeland.

in America, a man who has found refuge
is a river whose dunes has been erased by drought
& not forgetfulness.

forgetfulness is not the absence of memory
it is how you know
a country is killing you slowly.