One Poem

Eniola Arowolo

History Becomes a Metaphor for Tragedy

(2024)

I did not run away, I walked away by daylight — Sojourner Truth

how quick you can lose your life at the cusp of rebellion. stubborn hope toppled, trampled upon. imagine
Gabriel Prosser, rooted at the threshold of Richmond, watching the city that once held him a captive about
to lose its splendour. until a rainstorm broke down the door & carted off his freedom. this is how i learned
the history of my ancestors, becoming a placeholder of desolation. their bodies—like ethanol fermented
out of a sugarcane—deprived of breath. their children spread over cotton fields, unmade by thirst &
hunger in the sun-scorch. their women reduced into sex toys.

tell me how best to
   kill the weeds without inflicting violence
on the whole orchard
             one evening, they captured a sharecropper
    beat melanin out of his skin
& hanged him on a mahogany tree fire lit under his genitals
     peace sunders where a black man goes
a stack of tuxedos + loads of rifles back to Africa = a pile of slaves
                       stocked on a ship slated for a sojourn of ache
epitaphs etched on the heads of rebellious fathers
                at the coast, they cushioned their scars with silence
                                     & evened out their hearts into neat prayers to gods.
It’s 2080, the news mourns a boy stockpiled in the chest
                                            with boat-tail bullets:
his skin was brown, the colour of beach sand. a cyborg shot him
                                    in the woods on a morning run.
what other memories have my people served if not a daily
                         remembrance of tragedy—their souls levitating
towards the drifting clouds.
                                   the crackling AI says gravity is the force that attracts
a body towards the centre of the earth, the same way something
                      keeps pulling me to dust.
i only gift a brother a gauze for his soft wound, and in return
                                  my joy suffers a gangrene.

Cover image: Slave in Chains, anonymous, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons