Here’s Glory

By Tares Oburumu
After Nabagasera

If I have sinned against my own body,
then let grace shine on your self-preservation.

Here’s the diurnal history of leaving,
of the glory of airplanes jangling in the sky.
Here’s the city, cobalt blue; the loneliness of snow
listed on leaves of autumn.
There, the young man and gay artist seen from Mars,
in his pursuit of happy endings and a half-finished desire.
Here comes one of the ten thousand stars
to the small city of Ames.
Here comes Regulus, there’s John Haila,
through the American apricot seed, golden,
in the soft soil & map of his palms.
Hope has finally grown to live somewhere in the Econo,
in a room with an Alphard window that never closes heaven,
which cannot be opened against the fireflies in view,
pouring in from the Saharan night.
Here’s a poet held, as Bernadine was once held
by her Booker trophy, by the winning lights
which looked like the Erin Ijesha waterfall.
In Ben’s painting, I am the prey hunted down the slopes
of an old civilization that said, man, you cannot love another man in Oron.
That cried out the Hymeneaus bathing the epithalamium with blue tears.
That it’s tutu to be fixated on the portrait of a man in red chalk.
Running between countries, looking tunnel deep
in a nest of leavings, I gasp at the birds flown overwhelmingly
over the border town of Badagry.
I, too, should have had wings like this flock of barnacle geese.
I belong to them, these pairs of history, these new feathers built
as truthful as what protects them from hurt.
They seem to have heard my heart are now asking me
to keep my feet where they soar, crossing the sea.
Migration is an African story I love to tell with my neo-black
skin on, shining free, watching Adlai brightened by the matchstick in his fingers,
as the bridge to Del Martin & Phyllis Lyon lay beautiful before him.
One on which I walk, not afraid to be African.
One on which I paint myself to let go of the shore behind me
by walking through the sea that wrote Jamaa to death.
He strikes the waves from a year far away, but already,
Ben has renamed the colors as Sea Port, Ames, Thomas
Jefferson’s love for a slave girl & the poems that spin
around the sun.
Here’s the universe I believe in. Here is glory.
There’s Kimberly Nguyen. Here I am, she says, burn me.

BIO:
Tares Oburumu is a poet & essayist. His works have appeared in Connotation Press, Bluepepper, Turnpike, Eunoia Review, Woven Tales Press, Dawn Review, Loch Raven Review, Agonist, IceFloe Press, & elsewhere. He’s the winner of the Sillerman Prize for African Poets 2022. A two-time Pushcart prize nominee.