Ex Libris: A Poem

21 January 2011 No Comments

Poet Adebe DeRango Adem

By Adebe DeRango-Adem

I come from the land of
Where You From?
My people dispossessed of their stories
and who have died again and again
in a minstrelsy of afterlives, wakes,
the dead who walk, waiting and
furrowed, like ivy crawling up

All those museums and mausoleums,
lifting languages from rivers.
But I cannot leave them
for the rugged North
nor the hot-blooded South south of us,
nor the untamed rivers or deltas
that plaster us to our jackets

My road is neither smooth nor gravel,
my destination neither cathedral nor whole.
I am learning
all about ex-colonial States and states,
the oblivion of my fate
and the legacy of the Veil
from sea to shining sea, drowning
in the calm of our Great Lakes

And the orphan angels
who crowd our classrooms:
I see them, heartless & disrespected
each page burning as it gets read,
and their othered faces burning to tell the others
this ain’t nobody’s Atlantic!
we don’t have to keep on dyin’ in books!

Adebe D.A. is a SWAY writer and former student of poet Amiri Baraka, whom she studied under at Naropa University in 2008. She has since published ex nihilo (Frontenac House, 2010), a poetry collection that considers the relationship between art and racial identification, and helped edit an anthology of interracial women’s writings, Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (Inanna Publications, 2010).