Editor’s Note: Adebe DeRango-Adem was selected by Sonia Sanchez as a winner of the Boston Review 2021 Annual Poetry Contest. Due to their complex formatting, we encourage reading these poems on a computer screen.
THESE LINES BE A LONG TIME COMING / they come from
primordial scream forecasts varieties of false teeth & a taste
for self the dark fascinating rhythms insurgent
throughout my genealogy / a lingering auricular-oracular line
that begins in a village with a great-great
uncle who dealt in kinetic currency / saw all through third eye
& spoke with an older axumite knowledge
& my father before he was my father belonged to a people who
had names for all the stars above hambaricho mountain / knew
their place in the lineage & were known to frequent
frequencies beyond the small arc of western suffering /
moved as unburied marvels & kept moving on
missionaries stepping outta line & finally carved
as though by magic churches from underground rock
threw rome a bone & called it a day & when the
italians came again in 1896 they had slim picks & lost trying
to decipher the spirit on ethiop’s lips / so should
you wonder what country I am reeeeeally from you
will have to play it way-wicka–wicka–wicka-wayyyyy back to the age of
mystics & wizards by trade to come from my country
is to arrive at the beginning of multitudes these pages
once upon a tree but the rhizomes beneath
a scattered network of howls
HEAR ME OUT / DEAR BREAD OF LIFE
pantry on carnegie ave / dear botanical gardens /
thing of curatorial beauty I can try & tune out the
loud swirling of trees / green as money / that beautify the
broken streets / try & drown out the sound of
the vacant rowhomes empty abodes / of dead millionaires
with songs on the radio / but when that song about the
rains in africa comes on / I begin dreaming of axum
nubia / how we reigned / in reality I am facing lake erie
& the marina / where two Black men in thick camouflage
coats fish & talk about God / in reality they are likely
/ conversing in murmurs / grunts in veteran speak / & by this time
it is raining ever so slightly on euclid / & I pass
two more elderly men / with soft branches for a body
/ & in an abstract maternal gesture / as if to say sorry
for the war that conscripted you so as to script your life
/ into a theatre of pain
(or is it / the pain we share / I see /
in which I am / your understudy)
/ a production in which you are known for
your famous last lines
(or do we need / to switch up
that storyline)
/ including the one that “philanthropy”
wasn’t the result of “giving”
Black people hell
& still we gave
you our children
who became your
mistresses
even gave you our musics
let you mimic our medicinal blues
what say you amiri
I can hear you
sonia hear you hughes
is it because we made you that you don’t want us because
you
need us like sight
needs darkness to make sense
of light
