Baba Badji

Letter Postage to a Senegalese Prisoner

I miss you & your peace of mind, & your volcanic awareness.

I would like to thank you on behalf of all the dead,

Dead political prisoners, dead mothers,

The little girls weeping for your arrival.

The forgotten little boys who are detained & wounded.

In those crowded jail cells, caged, among flies, kittens, insects.

Dried dead beetles, rats, lizards, flesh on flesh, sweat on sweat,

Wound on wound in hunger for rotten potatoes.

In Maison d’Arrêt de Reubeuss; protests were strategic.

But in the streets, we have been dispersed with teargas,

Gas canisters exploded on our faithful backs killing us ominously.

Today, I am detained in the dusty streets of Dakar,

My city of birth, because today was supposed to be,

The end of a creature of great power reign for 12 years.

Please say thank you, to the captives of captives in

Maison d’arrêt et de correction of Cap Manuel,

Please tell him, I know it is my right to protest.

Please tell him, I know it is my right to vote.

Meanwhile, have you finished writing this season?

Of rule for 12 years? I know you are in the thick of it.

Do you have time to rework some of the constitutional decisions taken?

So how have you been holding up in Cap Manuel?

How are the voices in your head in Cap Manuel?

Are you rewriting Senegalese faith, anything, all in Cap Manuel?

I know you are praying, are you working-out, are you reading the Koran?

While you are in Cap Manuel, write to the mothers, write to the youths.

While you are in Cap Manuel, write to the officers, write to the military.

While you are in Cap Manuel, write to the newborns, write to the nurses.

While you are in Cap Manuel, write to the imam, write to the priest.

While you are in Cap Manuel, write to streets vendors, write to the beggars.

While you are in Cap Manuel, write to the little girls crying for your reappearance.

A Letter of Their Own                                                            

                                                                        After Seamus Heaney & Lucie Brock-Broido

Mama Brock-Broido nurtured crows behind the

Workshop because scenes were uncommon

In the corners of Dodge Hall. How one might love the

birds’ songs, they sang of truth for her sleep.

Her ways of caring for the village’s river.

Parochial fluids: Bissap, gingerroot, and carrot juice 

She is always looking for what came at sea in the poem,  

Shellfishes arriving in godliness intentionally on the page. 

Slowly, slowly, ever so slowly. A sacred bridge for

Blessing kept us alive in the writing. In the crypt, we keep searching

For history, pain that will never be there because that’s

How Mama Brock-Broido wanted it to be. Her world works.

The tone of her voice rose and fell, she was accustomed

Of torturing poetry alone for Whiteness heard what she thought.

The result of the whole worth of her welcome, & the children, juvenile poets,

Will never know their voicehoods, changing their American faith

In the American tradition, Mama Brock-Broido’s flare emerged.

In time and across cultures lapping our privacy done in the poem corpses.

Mama Brock-Broido does not find it terrible that her law of faith

Will not change her Americanness, her wetting spooky syntax

filled with roseleaves and ghosts feeding ravens in

The village’s rice farms, her gesture has been ignored.

Her carnal desires to remain with us, for us, in us and so on—

Sensitive to her set of scripts the sonnets. Slaves hidden; she gestures. 

Her touch is skillful. French Fries in the elegy. Sprouted chickpea soup.

Peanut butter. Dried nuts. Morningside Park when she slept deeply.

She is bristling at sea, never worn-out or anxious; nor, rude & angry.